Amitex opens office for feds

Amitex Corp., an information assurance provider, announced today that it has opened a Washington, D.C., regional office in Reston, Va., to better serve its federal customers.

Amitex, a Chicago-based small business serving the public sector, is on the General Services Administration's schedule and offers information security solutions, mass storage systems and database services, including warehousing, data mining and Web integration, said William McSweeney, the company's president and chief executive officer. Amitex's clients include the Department of Veterans Affairs' hospital system, Defense Department medical programs and several state and local agencies.

The Reston office will help the company serve the VA and support prime government contractors in the region, McSweeney said, adding that the staff will start small, but should increase in the future.

"We're starting with two [people] and are going to grow it as need [dictates]," McSweeney said. "We expect fairly substantial engineering staff as well as marketing [and] sales, and it could grow to 10 to 12, or more."

In conjunction with the announcement, Amitex named Mike Smith as Washington-area director of marketing and business development. Smith has been a marketing consultant for clients including DynCorp, Electronic Data Systems Corp., ACS Government Solutions Group, Litton PRC Inc. and other general contractors. He also spent five years working as director of public affairs with the National Association of Manufacturers, establishing Capitol Hill contacts.

"I know the Washington IT community very well, and my job is to create partnerships for the Chicago headquarters and national offices," Smith said.

Amitex recently completed its first major security testing and verification project at the VA hospital in Loma Linda, Calif. The project helped the VA improve its ability to have remote network access for medical personnel and doctors. The company has been asked to continue this security audit project at the VA hospital in San Diego and other California medical centers, McSweeney said.

Amitex is negotiating subcontractor relationships with several larger government information technology companies and should be announcing some new federal customers in the near future, McSweeney said.