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LAS: Herndon’s
name-searching firm
What’s
in a name? More than you think. “Names are like
compact databases,” says Jack Hermansen, CEO of
Herndon-based Language Analysis Systems. Armed with
a database of nearly a billion names, the company’s
software is a new tool in the fight on terrorism.
It
lets security agencies match names of known terror suspects
despite spelling variations that commonly happen when
transliterating from languages that don’t use Roman
characters. LAS software helped federal investigators
trace some of the terrorists of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks
to the Florida flight school where they trained.
LAS
released its software in February 2001 and has grown
quickly since then. Revenues doubled last year over
2001, says Hermansen, who studied linguistics at Georgetown
University. He predicts revenues will double again this
year though he won’t reveal dollar amounts. “Far
and away our largest customer is the federal government”
including such agencies as the FBI and the Transportation
Security Agency.
LAS
was actually co-founded in the late 1980s and worked
exclusively for U.S. security agencies. In the late-1990s
it began developing off-the-shelf software products
because that’s what its government clients said
they wanted. “So we sell [the software] now as
products, and the government is much happier about that,”
he says.
It’s
also sold software to private-sector firms such as New
Jersey-based business-information seller Dun & Bradstreet
or Arkansas-based Axciom Corp., a customer-data firm.
A company in Arizona, Airline Automation Inc., is using
the software to help airlines detect customers who book
seats on several flights but only intend to use one.
Today
the company has about 15 employees, and Hermansen says
it might have up to 25 by year’s end. He just hired
a chief operating officer to help manage the changes.
Where will this company end up? “We’re really
an enabling company. We fit in with other companies.
We expect ... in the next five years, some other company
will want to acquire us.”
Virginia
Business - April 2003
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