Aradiant turned out to be one of those companies that could not fully recover in the aftermath of the dot-com bust. Their main advantage is that they had an infrastructure in place long before the boom happened, so they were better equipped to deal with a sudden loss in the majority of their business. But it wasn't enough to keep their head above water.
Prior to the round of layoffs that resulted in the termination of my employment, the company had sunk a lot of money into Research and Development to find new ways they could capitalize on untapped market potential. But they came up empty-handed. They determined that operator-based text messaging and the Servistream website service were the only two areas they had proficiency in and looked more to supporting that end of the business. One of the things they were able to get a commitment on was that Verizon was going to send all the business for their alpha-numeric pagers through Aradiant beginning in 2002. That amounted to 4,000 accounts.
In February of 2002, the San Diego Padres looked to Aradiant to handle their ticket sales. They wanted to dump out of TicketMaster. And there was a possibility that if it went well, the Chargers would follow suit. The Padres deal would help keep the center afloat seven months out of the year. I never knew if the Chargers decided to use the service, but that wouldn't have had a much impact as they only played around 10 or so games at home every year (including pre-season).
After that, me keeping up with the company got rather sketchy. I know that my former Supervisor Camd attempted to become a Supervisor for the Servistream side. However, they left an important requirement for the position off of the company posting and didn't tell him he didn't qualify until after they filled the job.
During this time, the popularity of phone to phone text messaging skyrocketed, eliminating the need for dispatch agents. About a year later, Camd got caught up in the next wave of layoffs. He had disciplinary action on his record, so even though he had the most seniority out of all the Supervisors, he was let go. We've managed to keep in touch over the last few years and are currently connected on LinkedIn. He's the Project Director of a non-profit organization in San Diego.
I know of one dispatch agent from my team who was still with the company as of 2005. I actually located that guy. He's now a desktop technician at Navy Federal Credit Union. I'm glad he was able to find stable work.
I know that there were plans to relocate operations in Tijuana. I recall going to the company website and it was very ambiguous about what service they provided. Reading stuff on-line, it looks like they went into providing tech support for various software companies. I don't know when they finally went out of business. However, the name is now being used by a manufacturer of coating and drying machinery in Pennsylvania.
But for a significant period of time, Aradiant/NDC was an important part of the electronic communications industry and provided jobs for so many people I knew in San Diego. It wasn't the best job for everybody, but it was great for me while I was there.
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