One Franklin-based company has its own solution to Nashville’s shortage of mobile application developers and coders — building developers from the ground up.
“We are dying for rails developers right now,” said Carrie Gofron, vice-president of business development at Metova, a 25-person shop that custom builds mobile apps for businesses across all industries.
To fill its need for mobile application development talent, Metova hires graduates straight out of school, even ones who haven’t majored in computer science, and trains them from the ground up, partnering them with a senior developer when they come on board. Gofron said Metova can have new hires up and running on client projects within eight to 10 weeks by going through its developer boot camp.
Metova, which was founded in 2006, needs talent, as the company is set to expand its national reach and enter new industries. In September of last year, Metova was aquired by Arkansas-based A4 solutions, which provides IT services to government entities. A4 assumed the Metova brand-name.
As a result, Metova is expanding its reach into government contracting, developing apps for federal government agencies, including one that tracks military inventory between the U.S., Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. The company is also growing its commercial business, partnering with nationally known companies like eHarmony to build its app.
Health care, though, is an industry where the company sees significant opportunities. Gofron just returned from the annual HIMSS conference, the trade show for health care IT. HIMSS launched a mobile unit last year, and is pushing research, studies and best practices around the use of mobile apps in health care.
Health care apps aren’t entirely new for Metova — the company developed and launched WebMD’s MedScape app several years ago — but HIMSS provided Gofron a deep-dive into the tech issues facing health care companies today, including interoperability among platforms. She also noticed a lack of Android presence at the conference. Everyone was developing for iPhones and iOS operating systems, she said, seeing an opportunity for Metova to provide a solution for Android users.
By E.J. Boyer, Staff Writer, Nashville Business Journal
This article originally appeared in the Nashville Business Journal.
