Tiny Harford Co. tech firm lands federal deal to track foreign

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Nov 16, 2004 by Robyn Lamb

Not even a year after moving from home offices into a Harford County incubator, a technical service upstart has inked deals worth more than $1 million with the Department of Homeland Security.

Under the contracts, RTR Technologies LLC will develop and apply computer simulations to help the Department of Homeland Security analyze the effectiveness of US-VISIT, a program that will eventually track 33,000 daily visitors to the United States.

It was a very nice award, said Chief Executive Reed Rippin. We were originally supporting facilities and engineering. We were the only ones that had modeling expertise so other offices had been using us to do modeling.

The two one-year contracts expand the scope of RTR's previous work with the Department of Homeland Security, giving the company exposure and laying inroads to other critical divisions within the department.

For United States Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology, US-VISIT is the newly automated entry-exit program that uses biometric identifiers - namely digital photographs and digital, inkless fingerprint scans - to authenticate visitors' identities and prevent the entry of terrorists.

Under the program, visa-seeking foreigners provide fingerprints to and are photographed by U.S. embassies or consulates abroad. Upon arriving at the U.S. border, new fingerprints and photographs are taken and screened against the originals to authenticate identity. They are then run against government watch lists and the FBI's criminal database.

The system has been used at 115 airports - including Baltimore/ Washington International Airport - and 15 seaports since the start of the year. Yesterday, it was expanded for testing at land border sites in Texas, Arizona and Michigan in anticipation of a larger roll-out to the 50 busiest land ports of entry by year's end. It is expected to be used at all 165 U.S. land border crossings by the end of next year.

RTR's job during the next year is to build models that can evaluate the impact the program will have on operations, resources and the environment before the technology is put in the field.

The contracts, which are only a small part of the program that has already cost about $1 billion to implement, have been critical to RTR's growth.

Founded and funded in July of 2003 by three former executives from technical support services firm Regal Decisions Systems Inc. in Fallston, RTR's staff has grown to nine employees. Although it signed its first two contracts - worth about $300,000 - with the Department of Homeland Security in October of last year, the company's revenue this year so far totals about $700,000.

And the company, which sprung to life in the home offices of its founders, is growing out of its 1,000-square-foot incubator space at the Higher Education and Applied Technology Center in Aberdeen.

While the contracts are only for one year, Rippin is confident they will be renewed.

Company founders developed good working relationships with the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Navy, RTR's other major client, while working at Regal Decisions Systems, Rippin said.

The US-VISIT program has been set up but it doesn't have a charter for when it would end. I can't see it going away for the next five to 10 years.