Luminant Worldwide Corp. (Nasdaq, LUMT: $38.50) may be one extreme of partnering. The company went public in September at an offering price of $18 and now has a market valuation of $900 million.

The newly public company is actually one big partnership in e-commerce consulting. Strategists came together with programmers, technologists and designers. Eight companies, two from Virginia, became one with the IPO: Align Solutions Corp. of Houston; Free Range Media Inc. of Seattle; I.Con Interactive of Dallas; InterActive8 Inc., Multimedia Resources LLC and Brand Dialog, all in New York; Potomac Partners Management Consulting LLC of Reston; and RSI Group Inc. of Herndon.

Luminant’s chairman is Michael H. Jordan, retired CEO of CBS Corp. He looked at more than 100 companies before settling on the eight that are Luminant. James R. Corey has been president and COO since September and was founder and managing director of Potomac Partners.

Potomac Partners provides Luminant’s strategy-consulting expertise. The Reston company had been looking for a partner when it met up with Jordan. "We thought of ourselves as focused on e-business strategy, and that was only a subset of the service that [clients] needed," Corey says. Potomac Partners wanted creative skills for online branding, experts who knew how to drive traffic to the sites and technology skills to build sites and integrate them into mainframe systems. "We spoke with 10 other firms before we decided Luminant was the right answer for us," Corey recalls.

Luminant now has 750 employees across the United States at offices in 11 major cities. It serves principally Fortune 1000 clients with $1 billion or more in revenues as well as dot-com companies. "One of the things that’s unique about Luminant relative to others in this space is that it has the best blue-chip client base in this industry," Corey says.

One of those clients is McLean-based Mars Inc. Its Web site collection features interactive, fun sites aimed at teens — with animated M&Ms, novelty shops and fun features. "They get hundreds of thousands of visitors," Corey says. "The average stay is 30 minutes. You certainly can’t sell 25-cent candy over the Internet." Rather the site builds the brand and builds relationships with customers. Other clients include AmeriTrade, AT&T and the U.S. Postal Service.

This column typically hones in on Virginia-based companies. Luminant technically is in Dallas. But with the IPO, the Dallas company technically acquired the others. Corey continues to live in Great Falls, since Potomac Partners is a virtual operation. "I have learned to operate in that environment," he explains. "I spend most of my time traveling and being with clients. If I had an office in Dallas, I wouldn’t be there, either."

Corey says the Northern Virginia connection is still important. "It’s a very rich source of talent in the entire Internet field." Another of the Luminant eight — Resource Solutions International — will be the eastern region technology development center for the company. Both companies remain in Virginia.

Who does Luminant compete with? A collection of different firms. There are companies like Reston-based Proxicom (Nasdaq, PXCM: $87.38) that focus on the e-business marketplace. Luminant is also competing against traditional strategy and consulting companies such as McKinsey & Co., where Corey and other Luminant executives once worked.

With eight companies coming together, Luminant may be a bit of an anomaly. More common are partnerships, alliances or your standard acquisitions. In but one example, the Internet service provider PSINet (Nasdaq, PSIX: $68.13) in mid-December completed its acquisition of Transaction Network Services (NYSE, TNI: $45.75), which handles point-of-sale transactions for retailers. Both companies are also in Reston.

Look for more mergers, acquisitions, alliances and partnerships as the Internet industry begins to mature and consolidate. But in Northern Virginia, you can also count on many more spinoffs and start-ups as serial entrepreneurs build ideas into companies at astounding speeds.