Mastech grew its revenue every year from 1986 to its IPO, and made a profit every year since 1987. Sunil Wadhwani and Ashok Trivedi built the IT services firm in Pittsburgh. They recruited skilled programmers and placed them with large companies that could not hire fast enough. In December 1996 the Year 2000 bug was looming, and every big company needed people to fix its old code.

Programmers for Hire

Mastech sold a single source for software work: building client/server systems, moving old programs to new machines, installing ERP packages, and fixing Year 2000 date problems. Its model was to staff projects with trained engineers at client sites and to move more work offshore. By 1996 it had offices in Pittsburgh, Washington, San Francisco, Toronto, Singapore, London and Tokyo. Wadhwani and Trivedi kept about 78 percent of the stock after the offering.

Mastech Becomes iGate

Mastech priced its IPO at $15 a share in December 1996 and listed on Nasdaq as MAST. In 2000 it renamed itself iGate and leaned into internet services and offshore delivery from India. It spun its staffing business back out as Mastech in 2008. In 2011 iGate bought the larger Indian outsourcer Patni Computer Systems. Four years later France's Capgemini bought iGate for about $4 billion.

Cover: The Holy Family Leaving by a City Gate, plate seven from The Flight into Egypt, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a city gate (iGate).