Founded in 1980 as a 5,000‐square‐foot panel shop in Irondale, Alabama, by Bob Adams, silent partner Law Lamar (subsequently bought out in 1992), and Bob’s brother, Tom Adams, our early customers were mostly in the water, wastewater, and natural gas pipeline transportation and distribution. Our growing reputation for building quality panels drove us to move to a 25,000 square-foot building in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, in 1986. Around this time, we also began our transition from panel shop to control system integrator with panel capabilities, bringing on more partners that expanded our knowledge of water/wastewater instrumentation, computers and networking, and mining and metals applications.
The 1990s saw a deepening focus on system integration, as well as our current office location. We moved our headquarters to the current campus near Hoover, AL, in 1997. The move gave us over 64,000 square-feet of shop and electrical engineering space, preparing us to expand our operations into the new millennium. In this vein, we undertook a series of strategic acquisitions that significantly expanded Revere’s depth and breadth of systems integration knowledge across several industries and applications. Between 1995 and 1999, we acquired three independent systems integrators. M&A Controls (1995), a local electrical distributor, brought us several employees with deep general automations experience who contributed to Revere significantly in the following years. Southern Engineering & Equipment Company (SEECO, 1999) delivered a high degree of specialization in medium and high voltage systems for power distribution, as well as packaged steam-turbine generator systems for cogeneration applications. Multitech Systems (1999) was acquired primarily because of the engineering talent within the firm, as well as the delivery of a large OEM customer. We also purchased the blower division assets of a major OEM controls provider in 1998, and this expertise is a piece of the backbone of our vibrant OEM services business to this day.
The new millennium represented an exciting time for Revere’s reputation as a system integrator. In 1999, we developed and released REX 1.0 (Revere EXtranet), a ground-breaking web-based application that gave us significant visibility into projects of all sizes, allowing internal project management processes to become more efficient. It also gave our customers 24/7 access to their project’s status and documents, greatly increasing customer peace of mind in working with Revere. After joining the Control System Integrators Association in 1999, we passed our first certification audit in 2002. To become a CSIA-certified system integrator, a firm is audited on 10 unique areas of best practices, from engineering and quality, to finance and business development. CSIA certification ensures our customers they’re working with an integrator at the forefront of best practices, and we’ve devoted significant resources to assuring we pass each 4-year audit since with flying colors. Also, in 2002, we became a founding member of the Automation Alliance Group. AAG membership gives us partnerships and project support resources through leading system integration firms around the world, with members in places like Canada, Colombia, Italy, and Russia. In 2009, we started RevereU, an internal video-based training service, to develop job‐specific training for our employees, and company-specific policies and procedures much of which focus on safe jobsite and job practices.
With 20+ years of systems integration experience, 30+ years of panel experience, and the certifications and resources to prove it, we began expanding our footprint within the continental United States. In 2012, we opened our first remote offices in Chattanooga, TN (since closed, though remote engineering personnel remain in town), and St. Petersburg, FL. This gave us the locational ability to support our customers where they are, rather than exclusively from Birmingham. The St. Petersburg sales office grew into a full operations office and moved to a more suitable facility in Lakeland, FL, in 2013, and our Charlotte, NC office opened in December of that year. The following year, Revere opened our Texarkana, TX, office and brought in a wealth of new automation and construction experience, giving us the ability to work as an “Automation EPC”, executing full-scale design-build projects internally. This office significantly increased our expertise in the oil and gas market, and as our customer base in Texas continued to grow, we added a second office in Houston’s Energy Corridor in 2018.
