Federal, infrastructure push leads Parsons to relocate

In the midst of a fast push to grow its federal and critical infrastructure footprints, Parsons Corp. has decided that its corporate headquarters should be in the proximity to key customers and decision makers in the Washington, D.C. region.

Parsons has relocated its corporate headquarters from the longtime home of Pasadena, California, to an existing facility in Centreville, Virginia, out of which its federal business is based, the company said Thursday.

A specific number of jobs being shifted to the Centreville hub was not disclosed, but Parsons Chairman and CEO Chuck Harrington said in a release the company’s “strategic actions over the past ten years, including acquisitions, have led to the Washington metropolitan area having Parsons’ largest concentration of employees worldwide.”

“The capital region is the epicenter of U.S. critical infrastructure policymaking, and home for many of our defense and (intelligence) customers," Harrington said Thursday in an emailed statement to WT. "These factors were at the core of our decision to relocate Parsons corporate headquarters.”

The employee-owned company has almost 16,000 employees worldwide and posted nearly $3 billion in revenue during 2017, according to its most recent financial statement.

For Parsons, this move comes nearly three months after the company consolidated its federal and infrastructure business units into one as part of an overall strategy to take on more complex projects that have technological convergence between the digital and physical domains.

Parsons has identified its core market areas as defense, security, intelligence and infrastructure to which the company believes it can bring convergent offerings to bear. That includes hardware and software, plus the operational technology systems that run physical infrastructure via the Internet or other types of connections.

Along with Defense Department and intelligence agencies, Parsons also counts the Energy Department as one of its customers given the company's focus on the convergence of critical infrastructure and federal.

The company has also used acquisitions as a tool to accelerate its push, including a pair of deals within the past year of defense technology integrator Polaris Alpha and more recently geospatial-focused OGSystems.

Termed by many market watchers as a “nontraditional buyer,” Parsons has made seven deals in this decade so far that are focused on the federal market.