InfoZen wins transportation employee credentials work

A small company with a catchy name, InfoZen Inc. is taking flight. The Rockville, Md., company recently won a $148 million contract from the Transportation Security Administration to run an automated system that verifies transportation workers' identities.

Terms of the contract, the largest in the company's 12-year history, call for InfoZen to ensure that the IT systems and applications for the agency's Office of Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing run smoothly.

The office's mission is to assess and verify the identity of transportation employees, from airline crews to dock workers and everyone in between, to protect the U.S. transportation system against terrorism and other national security threats. The 18-month contract has four one-year options.

The company will not do any threat assessments itself, InfoZen CEO Raj Ananthanpillai said. Rather, the TSA office will use existing systems to check employee names against current government databases, he said. Under the contract, the company will back up and administer the databases, troubleshoot operational problems and furnish virus protection, said William Boyd, InfoZen's project manager for the contract. The company also will format and mine data to support the assessments, he said.

"The actual matching and all of those things is done by computers, and are then checked by government intelligence analysts," Ananthanpillai said.
IBM Corp. held the contract for the last three years, but TSA officials restricted competition for the new contract to small companies, Ananthanpillai said. IBM joined InfoZen's team, which includes ManTech International Corp., Fairfax, Va.; Ciber Inc., Denver; and GEM Technologies Inc., Knoxville, Tenn.

Ananthanpillai said the company's new management team and philosophy helped win the contract. He said his first order of business when he took over the company in 2004 was hiring managers who had experience overseeing large contracts. Any company can write a good proposal, Ananthanpillai said, but the right personnel are essential to answer tough questions from customers.

He expects InfoZen to grow from its current size of 70 employees to more than 100 by the end of the year. That growth also depends on what other contracts the company wins, he said.

The company already has opened an office in Colorado Springs, Colo., where at least half of the work will be done. The other half will be in Maryland, Ananthanpillai said.

He said the company will grow over the next five years to between $200 million and $300 million in annual revenues. Ananthanpillai would not say what the private company's revenues were in fiscal 2005. If InfoZen hits its growth projections, the next step would be to take the company public, he said.

In the next six to 12 months InfoZen will start looking to bolster its organic growth by considering acquisitions, and size will not be a factor, Ananthanpillai said.

"We've all managed much larger programs and divisions and run companies, so there is no [size] limit to us," he said. "Whatever it takes to jump the hurdles."