đź”— Original News Article Published by Isaac Guerrero, Rockford Register Star, May 16th, 2016
ROCKFORD — Ray Montelongo figured out long ago that people want freedom, but they need security. So he made security his business.
A Rockford native, Montelongo is the founder and owner of Montel Technologies, a small business that in the past year has landed big contracts for video surveillance and related high-tech security services at Chicago City Hall, Navy Pier and Milwaukee's General Mitchell Airport.
Montel Technologies has installed hundreds of video surveillance cameras at school buildings in the Chicago School District and throughout the city of Chicago. Outfitting Chicago's Daley Plaza with a new employee security card access system was another big job. The Hispanic American Construction Industry Association recently nominated his company for Contractor of the Year. Montelongo didn't win, but his company's future looks bright nonetheless. Sales have doubled every year since 2010 and are on pace to triple this year. He employs six and plans to soon hire up to three full-time technical staffers.
“All the work we've done the last six or seven years is starting to pay off,” said Montelongo. "It's exciting."
Montelongo, who has an older brother and sister, said his parents taught them to value hard work and family ties. His mother was a stay-at-home mom. His father moved to Rockford from San Antonio at the age of 18 and worked as a machinist until retiring a few years ago.
He still marvels at the stories his father told him about Rockford's glory days of manufacturing.
“He would tell me, 'When I moved here you could quit a job and have another job in the next hour,'" Montelongo said. "Back then, business was booming, manufacturing was booming.”
The speed of technology and the complexity of a global economy has changed all of that. Yet, his father's lessons hold true, even in the ever-changing world of video surveillance.
“It was two things that I remember him always saying,” Montelongo said. “'If there was something you didn't know, go get a book and figure it out.' And, 'You can achieve anything you want, but you have to work hard because nothing is free.'”
The world of video surveillance is advancing so rapidly that even Montelongo can't predict what it will look like in five or 10 years. Cellphones, hard drives and video cameras are becoming faster, cheaper and simultaneously bigger and smaller as technology marches forward. Montelongo credits the computer networking skills he learned at Bradley University — he earned a business degree with an emphasis in computer information systems — with his success today. After college, he worked for his older brother Jim's company in Peoria, Advanced Cad/Cam Service, eventually serving as the company's information technology director.
Montelongo knew he wanted to build his own business, just like his brother had done. So he did. His first technology venture was in the hospitality business. Before the dot-com bubble, venture capital firms invested in the necessary infrastructure to offer Internet service in hotel rooms, usually for a $9.99 per-room charge. Everyone wanted Internet access, but no one wanted to pay the charge, Montelongo said. When the dot-com bubble burst, "there were all these hotels everywhere that were just left with all this unused IT infrastructure," he said.
"I went around to the all the hotels and said, 'You can keep all your infrastructure in place, and I'll put in a server, retrofit your system and you'll have Internet tomorrow.'"
'Free Internet' became an amenity in the hotel industry. Montelongo made money by signing contracts with hotels to maintain their computer networks. Before long, he had maintenance contracts for 10,000 hotel rooms. All the while, he was thinking: What's next? The answer he came up with was video surveillance. Montelongo sold off the maintenance contracts and re-engineered his company. That led to a longstanding business relationship with Motorola, which he says was like a second college experience.
Montelongo is a busy guy. He's a morning person who likes to hit the gym at 5 a.m. A typical day involves conference calls and long hours in the office or long drives to and from Chicago for client meetings or site visits. Although most of his customers are in Chicagoland, Montelongo is determined to keep his business in Rockford, where he is raising his family.
Weekends are “daddy days,” he said, when he unplugs and his priority is spending time with his wife and two toddler sons. Rockford's Discovery Center children's museum is a favorite spot.
Technology keeps his family close. Montelongo equipped his Rockford home with high-tech security cameras, inside and out. He can take his cellphone out of his pocket and, with a few taps of his finger, call up a live video stream of his 1- and 4-year-old sons playing in the living room.
“He's very cutting edge and super creative,” said Mic Solon, a graphic designer who has known Montelongo for years. “Ray was doing Voice Over Internet Protocol years ago, before I even knew what that meant.”
Solon's design firm, Rock Copy, recently gave the Montel Technologies logo a makeover, and a gleaming custom-made business sign adorns the wall inside the company's business suite at the Prairie Street Brewhouse building in downtown Rockford. Montelongo's office resembles a high-tech command center. Sleek computers and big-screen monitors are everywhere.
Montelongo has developed an impressive circle of business associates as his work in Chicago has blossomed, Solon said, but he's not one to drop names.
“I think he likes being a business owner,” Solon said. “He likes being his own boss and taking things in a new direction. But he's also selfless. He does all this work in Chicago, but he's kept his business in Rockford. He's kept his family here. And he doesn't have to.”
Montelongo never stops asking himself 'what next?' He soaks up any opportunity to learn about business and technology, and was recently selected for six-week summer program at Stanford University for Latino entrepreneurs. His company is among 80 nationwide that were selected to participate in the program.
Understand how to build a computer network. That's the advice Montelongo would give a high school or college student today.
“You probably have a computer network in your own house,” he said. “You've got Wi-Fi, right? You've got a couple computers or a laptop hooked up to a modem. That's a very basic computer network. It's what my company does but on a much larger, more sophisticated scale."
The future is the “Internet of things,” Montelongo said, the idea being that one day all the devices you encounter in the course of a day — everything from your phone to your washing machine to your car and refrigerator — will talk to each other. And cameras will be everywhere. Video is already an inexorable facet of our daily human existence.
“Knowing how to build a computer network — every school ought to be required to teach that,” he said. “Networks. Connecting all that technology. That's the future.”
SOURCE: Isaac Guerrero. “Rockford native Ray Montelongo puts Montel Technologies and success on the same wavelength". May 14, 2016. Rockford Register Star.