Bridgehead IT riding wave of population growth and cybersecurity needs to expansion in San Antonio
The pandemic — and the changes it’s brought to the workplace — has had a major impact on businesses in the technology sector. In Texas, a population boom supercharged it.
Bridgehead IT, the San Antonio-based computer support and services company founded in 1999, has reaped the benefits of having already-established products increasingly being sought by small- to medium-sized businesses during the explosion of remote work: migrating systems to the cloud and deploying video-conferencing apps.
It’s growing to keep up.
Over the past two years, the privately owned company has doubled its revenue, brought on 255 new clients, added 20 employees and is relocating to a larger building.
In recent weeks, CEO Wes Bunch and his staff have been moving into a leased office building near Alamo Heights. It’s a sleek upgrade from its current offices and a launching pad as they expect to buy a larger building by 2027. Late last month, the company was putting the finishing touches on the 16,651-square-foot office to make room for at least 16 workers to be added this year to the 89 already on staff.
“Five years from now we want to be a nationwide powerhouse in IT,” said Bunch, 44. “We do service companies all over the world but we want to do more of that and we want to become a nationally recognized name. I think if you look up in five years, we will be.”
The plan, he said, is to grow through acquisition, but he declined to detail the acquisition targets.
Winning the pandemic
The Bridgehead IT origin story dates to the early days of San Antonio’s modern tech scene.
Bunch, a San Antonio native who graduated from the University of North Texas in Denton, founded Bridgehead Networks Inc. in 1999 as a “break/fix” operation that repaired computers and servers and did upgrades. That same year, Chris Brandvik dropped out of the University of Texas at San Antonio to start the now-defunct T3 Technologies Inc., a scantly staffed computer networking business.
The fresh-faced college graduates merged to form Bridgehead IT in 2012. It started with 13 employees.
“We were kind of the plumbers and the electricians back in the day and if something was broke, we’d fix it. Then we shifted to more technology management,” Bunch said. “We see Bridgehead IT being a big part of San Antonio’s growth for being a home for technology leaders.”
By 2020, the company had 54 employees and was growing in part by luring new clients as the state topped 29 million residents, a 16 percent increase over the previous decade. Texas drew in people, mostly from California, who were flocking to the state in search of lower taxes. About 44 percent of the state’s growth happened in the hearts of the state’s largest metros in Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis counties.
“It felt like the world was coming to Texas and there’s been a strong demand in population and technology growth,” Bunch said. “The primary driver of our growth was the business in Bexar and the surrounding counties.”
Like other tech companies, Bridgehead IT also profited from setting up remote internet connections and apps.
“The pandemic didn’t hurt the business either when everybody needed to work from home,” he said. “A lot of companies had to develop products around the pandemic. We already had that, so when it hit we just took what we already know and do and did more of it.”
Today, Bridgehead IT has 1,063 clients, up from 978 in 2021 and 808 in 2020. It services a host of clients including LASO Health, an online platform of San Antonio physicians, YMCA of Greater San Antonio, South Texas Renal Care Group, and Scania, the Sweden-based auto manufacturer.
Bunch considered opening an office in Dallas or Houston but ultimately decided to stay in San Antonio. He said the company will bring on even more clients from the influx of newcomers, especially in the San Antonio and Austin region, which includes a growing number of corporate headquarters, publicly traded firms and smaller businesses.
“We can provide our services globally right out of San Antonio,” he said.
Cybersecurity expansion
Amid growing cyber threats, Bridgehead IT has also added 24/7 incident response teams.
The company has 15 employees who install anti-malware programs to identify potential cyber threats for clients. Before the pandemic, it had two staff members running the programs.
The fast-paced hiring is reflective of a trend in the tech industry, which has been beefing up cybersecurity teams, and Bridgehead IT was able to pluck workers from existing talent in San Antonio — which has the nation’s second-largest cybersecurity workforce after Washington, D.C.
Andrew Evans, senior security analyst at Bridgehead IT, said the company also has a three-person cyber security team that strictly focuses on thwarting digital attacks. He expects to hire four more team members by year’s end amid “a sharp uptick” in the amount of phishing and credential stealing attempts on Texas-based clients in medical, manufacturing, distribution and financial investment industries.
“Most recently, attackers are sending email links to people that look completely legitimate,” said Evans, 28. “As soon as people attempt to log-in, the attackers try to steal their credential identification.”
This type of attack is dubbed “pass-the-cookie,” a genre of hacking that aims to bypass passwords to gain access to cloud-based infrastructure like Amazon Web Services, Google or Azure. Last month, the security team stopped four of the attacks in a single day.
“These four instances in one day would be the same concept of lightning striking the same place four times in a row,” he said. “That’s how rarely I see this attack before this happened.”
Moving day
For now, Bridgehead IT is keeping its 11,000-square-foot office building, a former Masonic Lodge close to San Pedro Springs Park in North San Antonio.
Late last month, several employees worked on the remaining desktop computers set up inside the brown building that shares a block with Firestone and Bailey Cleaners and Dryers. They took calls on headsets and packed their laptops, coffee cups and family photographs into boxes to move to their new office about 5 miles north at the ex-headquarters of auto paint manufacturer Xpel Technologies Corp., near Alamo Quarry Market.
Inside the old building, David Van Ronk, vice president of information technology, was clearing out his office while talking with his wife on the phone about weekend plans for their seven kids.
“It’s nice to outgrow this building,” said Van Ronk, 39. “We’ve been outgrowing this space we had here for years.”
For Van Ronk, who cut his teeth as a software architect at Oregon law offices and financial firms before managing the IT department at the International Bible College in San Antonio, BridgeHead IT will remain focused on cloud applications headed into the future.
“People used to go into the building and work, but now everybody is expected to go into a Starbucks and work,” he said. “It’s a different world. It’s where everything is headed and we’re moving toward it.”
eric.killelea@express-news.net
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