BELTWAY BIZ

No Place Like Home: SAP America Public Sector Inc. can get some moving tips from Quarterdeck Investment Partners Inc. officials, who are enjoying their new digs at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington.

The massive government office building on Pennsylvania Avenue - second in size to the Pentagon - will be home to international companies, shopping and government agencies such as the Customs Service. It will also house an International Trade Center.

Quarterdeck Investment Partners Inc., a five-year-old financial advisory firm based in Los Angeles, which already had a Pennsylvania Avenue address, chose the new venue because of the building's prestige. A dozen employees are at the new location. Quarterdeck specializes in mergers and acquisitions in the information technology, defense and aerospace industries.

Plans call for SAP to relocate from Vienna, Va., to Washington by the end of March. The company's America Public Sector subsidiary is a new business that focuses exclusively on the government and other public markets. Last month, SAP officials billed the company as the Reagan building's largest nongovernment client.

Time to Make Friends: To counter the awaited loss of its monopoly control on Internet domain name registration, Network Solutions Inc. of Herndon, Va., joined hands with two new partners Jan. 14.

Network Solutions, a public offshoot of Science Applications International Corp. in San Diego, signed marketing agreements with Dun & Bradstreet and Inc. Online. The three companies will jointly offer new ways for small businesses and individuals to register World Wide Web sites and to provide data to D&B for its business information services.

Network Solutions will use such relationships to keep registration of Internet domain names (those ending in .com, .org, .net and .edu) strong as its exclusive agreement with the National Science Foundation to provide the service expires later this year.

Industry analysts have long speculated that Network Solutions must become more efficient in its business practices once competition comes to the registration market, driving prices down and service offerings up.

-Bob Starzynski

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