Mitch Paioff, guest columnist for IT Business Edge, recently spoke with Mike Logan, president of Axis Technology, a Boston-based IT staffing firm. This is the second in a three-part series of Mitch’s interviews with IT staffing firm CEOs. In the first article, Mitch spoke with Deborah Vazquez, CEO of IT staffing firm PROTECH. You can also read an excerpt from Mitch's book in the Knowledge Network.

Paioff: Mike, what did you do before you started Axis Technology?

Logan: I worked for Oracle and then I worked for Digital Equipment. After that, I worked for a start-up in Silicon Valley and another start-up in Cambridge, Mass.

Paioff: In what positions?

Logan: I was mostly on the services side, in consulting. With DEC, I was a software developer, and with Oracle I was a database guru. I did a little bit of everything at Oracle.

Paioff: What changes have you seen in your business over the past six to 12 months?

Logan: Well, obviously, with the recession, the demand for IT services has dropped quite a bit, especially with any firms related to financial services. It's been a pretty substantial hit. I think it's flattening out. There seem to be signs of a recovery. I just think the initial signs are there. The market was doing okay just 12 months ago, and it looked fairly robust even until mid last year, and then the demand went down, the prices that people wanted to pay for consulting went down, and the competition got fairly fierce with the offshore vendors as well. So the line between the commodity work versus specialty work is getting kind of blurry.

Paioff: In which skill sets are you seeing the biggest decline in demand?

Logan: At least from our perspective, the demand for the executions skill sets is way down. That means developers, people in QA, people who write the apps, and those sorts of skills tend to be the ones where we’re not seeing much activity.

Paioff: And which skill sets are still hot despite the recession?

Logan: There seems to be a fair bit of interest in the analysis, strategy planning, data architecture, and data management skill sets as well. So we see a lot of our clients basically getting their arms around what they have to do, not necessarily doing it yet, but being ready. They are getting the estimates, getting the strategies worked out, doing the analysis work, and doing the research. They are potentially picking products, but not necessarily buying them.

Paioff: Getting back to the pricing issue, are you seeing instances where clients are giving you a price and saying, “Here's what we're willing to pay and no more”?

Logan: Yes, exactly. They're basically telling you what they'll pay.

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