Ferril new president at IdentiSys

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn.--IdentiSys announced in early January the promotion of Debra R. Ferril to president and chief operating officer. Ferril has been with the company since 2002, and had been serving as vice president of operations. She is credited with leading acquisitions of CompuCard and Southwest Datacom and growing the company at a 20 percent annual clip. Like IdentiSys chairman and founder Michael Shields, Ferril hails from ID manufacturer Datacard. Datacard eliminated its direct sales force in 1999, at which point Shields founded IdentiSys and became a primary Datacard dealer. However, the integrator has expanded its product line considerably. "We wanted to be total ID systems," said Ferril, "and that means handling a variety of suppliers' products ... We're looking at new and different technologies, and while Datacard is still a large part of our business, we do handle virtually every ID product that's available, much to the consternation of some of those manufacturers." "We wish," she joked, "we sold as much Fargo as Datacard thinks we do, or as much Datacard as Fargo thinks we do." She said her company's value comes in the integration and systems knowledge it can bring to a job, increasingly using the ID as a starting point for collecting information that an organization can then use in better ways: "We go back to when a pouch-laminated system was the only form of ID." Ferril hopes to grow the company quickly. She said they did roughly $17.5 million in 2006, and hopes to hit $20 million in 2007. Ferril said the company is seeing the biggest growth in requests for tracking applications. Currently, IdentiSys employs 78 and has close to 5,000 customers. As it looks to expand, "There's a couple of acquisitions we're currently looking at," Ferril said. "There are a lot that are neat and intriguing."