Applied Technology Group Inc.

In 2004, Applied Technology Group Inc. of North Little Rock turned the company’s focus to specialty software for architects and engineers.

Ben Hollowell, the president of the company, said it was a fortuitous move to embrace that Autodesk software. Applied Technology has since expanded to 38 employees, now operates in 13 states and typically sees double-digit growth each year.

“I would argue and feel pretty safe in saying that there are no other businesses like ours in the state of Arkansas that sell this computer drafting software to architects and engineers. Quite frankly, in the 13 states that we operate in we have very few competitors,” Hollowell said.

The recession led to a lull in the architecture and engineering sectors, but business in those fields has picked back up in recent years, Hollowell said. And changes in technology, especially cloud computing, have allowed firms to move at a quickened pace.

“So many times an architect or engineer was hamstrung in what they could deliver to a customer in terms of renderings of a building or what the project would look like when it was done … by the type of IT hardware that they had. You had to make a huge investment in computing power and disk space to be able to store some of these models and to render them in the different ways customers want,” Hollowell said.

The company puts an emphasis on training its employees and customers on its software, Hollowell said. It’s not uncommon, and the company is not averse to, employees leaving to work for the client businesses they worked with at Applied Technology, he said.

“The company in general is committed to education at all levels,” Hollowell said. “A lot of the technical employees within the company are industry professionals themselves.”