Time is money. That’s particularly true for the call center industry. Each minute of computer downtime at a stock brokerage operation costs an average of $108,000 in lost sales. For a credit card operation, the cost is estimated at $43,000 a minute.

As the holidays approach, many companies are gearing up for what is typically a peak service time for their industry, whether it’s travel, financial services or retailing.

“It’s not voodoo, though some people might think it is,” said Jerred Ruble, chief executive officer of TeamQuest Corp.

The Clear Lake-based company is one of a handful of companies in the technology industry that specialize in performance and capacity planning for corporate data centers. For the third year in a row, it was ranked last year among the top 500 software providers in the world by Software Magazine. TeamQuest’s global clients range from AT&T Corp. and Vodafone Group to Land O’Lakes Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Ford Motor Credit Co. In Iowa, its clients include Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the Principal Financial Group Inc. and Communications Data Services Inc.

TeamQuest was formed in 1991 by Ruble and two partners after Unisys Corp. announced plans to close its Clear Lake software development center where they worked. The company has since grown from 35 employees to 120, and Ruble expects to recruit another dozen employees this year.

“We’ve tried to concentrate on hiring people with some connection to the Midwest, and that’s helped us somewhat,” Ruble said. “We’re finding that several people have left the Midwest and are looking to get back to the Midwest lifestyle, and that’s working in our favor.”

Currently producing about $26 million in sales, the company has been increasing itsrevenues by about 20 percent annually, Ruble said.

“What our system does is measure key components, and then uses that data to allow systems analysts to monitor the systems so that they can be immediately alerted if there’s a problem,” he said. “They can use historical information to predict to a certain extent what’s going to happen in the future.”

For one of its major retailing clients, “what they can do is measure what their utilizations are at any point in time, and project it to this holiday season,” Ruble said. “Then our software will tell them if their servers will be able to handle it at a certain level of performance, or throughput. What several of the major retailers will do is reprovision some servers that handle other functions to handle orders during the holiday season, and then convert them back after the season.”

Additionally, companies that have added servers to build capacity over the past five years are beginning to use TeamQuest’s software to consolidate that capacity, Ruble said. Now, those companies are beginning to feel like the harried employees in the IBM ads who are pinned down in the break room by a crowd of servers.

“Actually, the consolidation of servers saves the human resources needed,” Ruble said, “because a human can manage only so many servers. So you can actually do more work with the same amount of staff.”

Among TeamQuest’s challenges is continuing to clear a bar that’s continually being raised by the software vendors, he said.

“One of those creating challenges for us is virtualization: running multiple operating systems on the same hardware at the same time,” he said.

“The other complication is that there’s getting to be more sophisticated software systems. I would say just across the board is what our customers are asking for is more automation. We’re looking at some more technologies that will help them automate the performance of their data centers even more.”