It all started with a bottle of Pepsi. The local distributor hired some programmers to find ways to save money. It snowballed from there, and Salient was born.

On the outside, Salient looks like your typical suit and tie company but inside, computers are buzzing away, tracking data. Software engineers are typing away, finding ways to save New York state millions of dollars every year.

“It’s absolutely about efficiency, economic efficiency. Getting more for less,” says Guy Amisano, CEO of Salient.

Guy Amisano ran The Elmira Bottling Company for decades. Around 1983, he wanted to come up with a way to keep track of who was buying what and how much.

“We didn’t lose money but we didn’t make any money either. So I decided at that point in time, after losing two days of sleep that it was time to take control of this economic system we call a business,” says Amisano.

So he hired computer programmers to develop software to do just that.

“The program let the average salesperson understand the worth of his activity so he could then adjust his activity for more profit,” says Amisano.

It became so profitable, Amisano sold the bottling company and went full time with Salient.

In the early 2000′s, Chemung county taxpayers were paying $20 million a year to cover the county’s share of Medicaid costs.

“Everything that we were raising in property taxes, growing at 10-percent a year, was going to one program called Medicaid. People were outraged by it,” says Tom Sanutlli, Chemung County Executive.

Santulli started a letter-writing campaign to then-Governor Pataki. Amisano got wind of it, and put his programmers to work tweaking Salient’s software to track Medicaid costs.

“The interesting thing was, Guy’s software package that actually tracked how every dollar and every procedure that was spent on Medicaid was a far better program then what IBM had come out with,” says Santulli.

County after county began using Salient’s data-mining software. Then, the state Medicaid office picked it up. Behind this door is Salient’s government division. We can’t get inside because of HIPPA laws but inside Salient employees are managing Medicaid data from across the state so counties can detect Medicaid from fraud and abuse.

It’s already saved New York state millions and it’s just the beginning for revolutionary software made right here in Horseheads.

“We think we can make a difference across the country and further,” says Amisano.

Salient’s software is now used on six continents.