Arlington Heights firm to put you on a cloud

Ameen Pishdadi founded Arlington Heights-based Gigenet, employs about 35 workers and plans to add services to grow the company even more.

Through his Web hosting and data storage company, this 29-year-old Hoffman Estates man has his hand on the pulse of the Internet. His clients include developers and re-sellers of services, or anyone who needs a dedicated server. Those clients serve thousands of other major corporations and organizations, from Tyson Foods to the St. Louis Rams.

"I first started out on the bottom of the food chain, and now we have several layers in between," said Pishdadi.

Pishdadi's enpreneurial spirit went full steam when he created a company with his brother in 1999 called Global Web Host. While the brothers went their separate ways by 2002, Pishdadi took on a partner and created Ecomdevel LLC, which led to a first data storage center and quickly grew. By 2004, Ecomdevel served a niche market, including financial companies. The business soon outgrew its downtown Chicago office and moved operations along with more related services to Arlington Heights under the new name of Gigenet.

Today, the company has 35 workers in Arlington Heights and in New Jersey. He plans to hire about 10 more workers by the end of the year. More serves also are expected, including desktop virtualization, or cloud desktop services, where a PC is replaced with an straight Internet connection that houses all that's necessary for a particular job. The worker would then just use a monitor and get access to work anywhere, he said.

"Our goal is to get them on the Internet and keep them there, 24/7 and 365 (days a year)," said Pishdadi. "Our objective is to never go down."

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