By Karen Brune Mathis, Managing Editor

Jacksonville-based DiscoverTec is moving up in the world.

The technology company founded in 1994 by CEO and President Donny Lamey will more than triple in space when it expands Sept. 15 from one building to another in the Butler Plaza business park in South Jacksonville.

DiscoverTec custom designs and develops websites to drive traffic to customers’ sites through Internet marketing and secure hosting.

The company focuses on web design; Internet marketing and search engine optimization; web development so clients can increase revenue or decrease costs; and website hosting housed in two datacenters on the east and west coasts.

Lamey states that a company’s “online reputation” is a critical element of business.

“That’s how a business owner is viewed,” he said.

DiscoverTec partners its space with two companies –– N-Play, a real estate Facebook application, and MedOfficeDirect, an e-commerce site for medical supplies. Together the three have 60 employees in about 7,000 square feet on the second floor at 4899 Belfort Road.

Come September, they will move to the top floor next door at 4887 Belfort Road where they will occupy 24,000 square feet of space, which can accommodate 150 employees. It also allows space for a fourth complementary company, Lamey said.

Lamey said Wounded Warrior Project is expanding in the 4899 Belfort Road building and needed DiscoverTec’s space, which opened the door for the move and expansion.

Tenant Contractors Inc. is renovating that fourth-floor space, which formerly was used by Flytele, a call center operated by British Airways.

The call center closed late last year, laying off more than 250 people. It had leased 50,000 square feet of space at the building. Deutsche Bank is leasing the remaining 30,000 square feet it vacated.

Lamey said the new space will offer a game room that includes foosball and pingpong, screens that will accommodate lunch-and-learns, an in-house video production studio, training rooms, conference rooms, a cafeteria area and an open floor plan for creative work areas. Biometric readers and digital cameras will monitor all of the activity of the entire space.

There’s also a Zen room for quiet reflection, which DiscoverTec will keep.

DiscoverTec won’t keep the three payphones, unless for historical curiosity. Flytele opened in 2001, a technological lifetime or two ago.

Lamey, 42, started his business in 1993 while in college at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. He was a finance major but switched to management information systems.

He began in IT support during the “DOS days,” the widely installed Disk Operating System for personal computers when they were introduced.

Lamey landed a Raytheon contract and incorporated in 1994. He spent a year rebuilding the business and chose Jacksonville, where he moved in 1995.

At first, he did everything in the business. His first clients included a Southside executive business center that today is owned by Regus.

He worked at the center and then expanded into other executive centers to serve their clients. He then opened his own, which he sold in 2009.

He also branched into home automation, selling that in 2007 to return to a focus on web development, web marketing and web hosting.

He opened on Belfort Road in 2010.

DiscoverTec custom designs websites for its clients, often starting from scratch. The smallest site it builds is $5,000 and the average ranges from $15,000 into “millions,” Lamey said.

The sites are built so that customers can adjust and update them internally.

Lamey and his wife, Julie, an accountant and director at Deloitte & Touche LLP, have a 9-year-old daughter, Meagan.

kmathis@baileypub.com

@MathisKb

(904) 356-2466