| High intrigue and high profits
Virginia Business
July 2004
Sytech Corp. normally provides its surveillance
and intercept technology to national intelligence and
drug enforcement agencies, but with a push into the
homeland security market after 9/11, this Alexandria-based
firm has been growing its reputation among local law
enforcement units. Which is why Baltimore police knew
exactly who to call last year after an 11-year-old girl
was kidnapped. When the kidnapper began making ransom
demands, cops asked to borrow one of Sytech’s
Advanced Analog and Digital Collection Systems, a cell
phone intercept device. “They were able to catch
the guy within hours,” says CEO Jose Diaz.
In fact, the company’s deep knowledge
of this type of cloak-and-dagger technology has also
enabled it to solve one of the biggest hurdles for the
front lines of homeland security: getting different
radio and phone systems
to communicate. “We know how to intercept all
these things, so we just modified what we were doing
so we could translate data from one device to another,”
Diaz explains.
The Radio Interoperability System (RIOS)
3001 allows first responders to talk to each other,
whether they’re using a cell phone, a two-way
radio or a satellite phone. In other words, a police
chief can sit in his office on a cell phone and talk
to 20 different personnel from 10 different counties
using all different types of traditional and not-so-traditional
emergency communication equipment. The product was used
very successfully at this year’s Super Bowl in
Houston, and now demand is so high, says Diaz that “we
can’t build them fast enough.”
Not surprisingly, this new breakthrough
is boosting revenues. Since 2002, Sytech, a minority-owned
business with 150 employees, has enjoyed a solid growth
rate of more than of 80 percent.
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