Goleta Company Can’t Stop Growing

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Network Hardware Resale changed its name in 2014 to Curvature. See Curvature.com.]

In today’s struggling economy amid rising gas prices and unemployment, one area company stands out as low-cost and highly efficient, and is expanding in employees and locations: Network Hardware Resale (NHR). Located in Goleta, NHR sells reasonably priced refurbished routers and network hardware from companies like Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, and Foundry Systems.

The story of NHR’s growth starts and ends in Santa Barbara County, which is part of what makes the company so unique. When asked why it chose to land in this county over somewhere more technology-centric such as the Silicon Valley, CEO Mike Sheldon remarked on the company’s early history with our beautiful area — his brother and father both attended UC Santa Barbara.

While acknowledging that Santa Barbara has some well-known drawbacks for companies (such as its smaller pool of people and high cost of living), Sheldon said the city has its “aces in the hole.”

“Not the least of which,” said Sheldon, “is no one wants to leave. The people who are already here are really devoted to this area, and because it’s a small community; you have a lot less turnover unlike Los Angeles or the Silicon Valley where people are job-hopping all the time.”

Once situated in Santa Barbara, 25-year-old NHR expanded its offices to all over the world, including New York, Dallas, Amsterdam, London, and Singapore. Its customer base consists of more than 100,000 companies worldwide, such as government entities, educational institutions, and health-care organizations. Its mission began as a resolve to become a “trusted source outside of the typical supply chain,” according to Sheldon. But it soon transformed into an undertaking to completely change the way the supply chain operates.

Rather than the usual 10 or so weeks it takes to order and receive equipment from other companies, NHR seeks to speed up the process and inject it with low prices and committed customer service and maintenance. This combination of efficiency and dedication has earned them multiple awards and acknowledgements, such as being recognized as a leading company in solution-providing in Everything Channel’s VAR Business Magazine.

Despite all of its recognition and expansion outside of Santa Barbara, NHR will be experiencing another growth — this time, locally. The NHR headquarters will be moving literally down the street on Hollister Avenue into a facility twice the size of its old one.

“Support will be getting a big boost in the move,” said Sheldon, “We’re going to expand our services division — the professional services that we offer in addition to the hardware, like the installation and maintenance.”

The new expansion will be centered on the company’s use of NetSure, a comprehensive network service program that will give customers a one-stop resource for technical support, network monitoring, and “unprecedented assistance for multi-manufacturer network environments.”

NHR’s inventory capacity will also be tripling in size, and its company will actually be hiring 20 to 30 new employees within the next year, according to Sheldon.