The companies were picked from a dozen finalists for the first Tayloe Murphy Resilience Awards presented by the Tayloe Murphy Center at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

The winners are:

Manufacturing/Agricultural: Morgan Lumber Co. Inc., Red Oak
Retail: ParknPool Corp., Lexington
Service: BandyWorks, Petersburg
Wholesale: Solid Stone Fabrics Inc., Martinsville
Chairman’s Award: Marstel-Day LLC, Fredericksburg

The awards include scholarships to attend Darden’s executive education programs.

Gregory B. Fairchild, executive director of the Tayloe Murphy Center, said 106 companies submitted entries in the awards competition. They had an annual average profit growth rate of nearly 189 percent and employment growth rate of more than 54 percent from 2005 through 2008.

To be eligible, companies had to be based in areas facing economic problems such as high unemployment, poverty or lack of access to larger markets.

Instead of moving their businesses elsewhere, the winners and the other finalists have been leaders in their communities and provided much-needed jobs, Fairchild said.

W. Tayloe Murphy Jr., a former state natural resources commissioner and member of the House of Delegates, chaired a five-member panel of judges. The chairman’s award is presented at the discretion of the chairman to a deserving company not selected as a winner in an industry category. Marstel-Day was picked this year for its contributions to environmental preservation.

The awards were presented in the Dome Room of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

However, the systems are still undergoing tests.

“The recent computer outages impacting state agencies, and the citizens they serve, are disappointing and unacceptable,” Gov. Bob McDonnell said in a statement. “In the days ahead we will be launching a comprehensive effort to determine how this situation occurred and, most importantly, how we can ensure it does not happen again.”

The Department of Motor Vehicles, the most public agency affected, will return to normal operations tomorrow. McDonnell said DMV offices will be open for extended hours to process the backlog of applications that has developed since problems began on Aug. 25.

The DMV has estimated that there is a backlog of 35,000 to 45,000 residents who have not been able to renew their license since computer systems went down last week.

Northrop Grumman and VITA employees have been working 24 hours a day since the failure of a major data storage system that affected 26 of the commonwealth’s 89 state agencies and caused 13 percent of the state’s storage servers to stop working.

McDonnell has called for a third-party investigation into the failure. In April, the state restructured its $2.3 billion IT contract with Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman Corp. gave the contract to CSC. It includes a 10-month base period with four one-year options.

Under the contract, Falls Church-based CSC will provide analytics framework services to support detection of cyber threats.

Botetourt County-based Lawrence Transportation Systems plans to buy the assets and trucking operations of Verona-based William Edwards Inc.

The deal is expected to add $10 million to Lawrence Transportation’s current annual revenue of more than $60 million.

William Edwards Inc. will continue its warehouse operations in Verona and dedicated fleet operations in Covington.

Lawrence Transportation has facilities in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. It was founded in 1932 and is employee owned.

The latest national look on downsizing from Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows that planned job cuts by employers in August fell to 34,768, the lowest monthly drop in more than a decade.

Announced job cuts last month were down 17 percent from cuts in July, the outplacement consultant said, and 55 percent below the 76,456 cuts for the same period in 2009.

Another bit of encouraging news: The August drop marked the first decline following three consecutive months of increases. “… The lay-off picture has improved so significantly that we are at pre-dot.com-collapse levels when it comes to monthly job-cut announcements,” John A. Challenger, the company’s CEO said in a statement. 

The industrial sector was the largest job-cutting employer in August, followed by government/nonprofit and retail. Year to date, the government/nonprofit sector has announced the most jobs at 112,378, with pharmaceutical the second hardest-hit industry with 37,265 cuts.

“If there is a double-dip recession on the horizon, either companies do not see it or they have no slack in their existing work forces. The recovery may indeed be stalling, but any slowdown is unlikely to lead to a sudden resurgence in mass layoffs,” Challenger said.

Robert Half International also expects a boost in hiring.  According to the California company’s most recent Professional Employment Report, 6 percent of 4,000 executives polled by telephone throughout the U.S. said they expect to increase the number of full-time staff in professional occupations in the fourth quarter. “Companies that overextended their teams are now selectively adding full-time employees,” said Max Messmer, chairman and CEO of Robert Half International.

Companies in the business services sector predict the most active hiring, particularly in the legal field, with 23 percent of executives planning to increase staff levels. “There’s no question that 2010 has been — and continues to be — the year for litigation, bankruptcy and foreclosure firms,” said Brett Good, a Robert Half senior vice president. “We don’t see any signs indicating a slowdown in these areas for the foreseeable future, as case backlogs, the housing market and overall employment rates continue to be concerns.”

The U.S. Labor Department will report its national August jobless figures on Friday.

Reston-based comScore Inc., a digital marketing intelligence company, said Wednesday its latest acquisition will help it create a global platform for digital development. The company acquired the Amsterdam-based firm of Nedstat for about $36.7 million. Nedstat offers web analytics and solutions for online business optimization. 

With the Nedstat technology installed on thousands of sites, comScore said the deal will help its global expansion, particularly in European markets. 

“The acquisition of Nedstat is another important step towards fulfilling our vision of making the United Digital Measurement (UDM) platform the global standard for global measurement,” Magid Abraham, comScore’s CEO, said in a statement.

Nedstat’s technology also will help comScore develop new applications.  Clients want a new class of business applications, the company said, so they can monetize digital audiences.

As part of the acquisition, Nedstat becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of comScore. comScore expects the deal to contribute about $4 million of additional revenue for the remainder of 2010. 

Jones Lang LaSalle’s Washington, D.C. investment sales team completed nearly $500 million in office, retail and land sales in the first half of 2010.  The commercial real estate firm said the level of activity stands in marked contrast to volumes for all of 2009. That year saw just three transactions closed for a total of $123 million.

“We have seen an extraordinary turnaround in the D.C. investment sales market as the limited supply of core-plus product is generating a true ‘scarcity premium,’” John Kevill, managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle said in a statement. Since the economic downturn, very few new buildings have delivered.

Domestic institutional investors are active,the company says, and international investors also are taking notice of attractive properties with low capitalization rates. “There’s a great deal of pent-up demand from buyers in countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Korea and Japan —  investors who never got caught up in the CMBS difficulties who are now looking for stable, well-located assets such as these in D.C.” noted Steve Collins, the head of the firm’s International Capital Group for the Americas. 

In the month of June, the team completed 5 transactions, totaling $332 million. One Virginia property included the sale of a grocery-anchored retail center known as Plaza America Retail in Reston to ARC/Angelo Gordon for $49 million. In another recent deal, Jones Lang handled the sale of Prince Street Plaza in Old Town Alexandria for a private seller. TA Associates bought the 52,809-square-foot building for $17.5 million. The property is 92 percent leased.

CACI’s help allows the public to access many of the library’s online collections. It has also helped the library develop digital archiving.

The contract has a one-year base period, with four one-year options.

On day six of the outage, 24 of the state’s 27 affected agencies were up and running Tuesday. Still not fully operational was the Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Taxation and State Board of Elections. State officials could not say when these systems would be up again, although daily updates are being posted at the Virginia Information Technologies Agency website. 

Meanwhile, DMV also continued to post updates on its website to let people know that it could not process driver’s licenses at its 74 offices. 

According to a statement from Virginia Secretary of Technology Jim Duffey, the problems began Aug. 25 with an infrastructure outage caused 13 percent of the commonwealth’s file servers to fail.  That knocked out service to 27 of the state’s 89 agencies. The failure came in the equipment used for data storage, commonly known as a storage area network (SAN).

The storage unit has been repaired, and VITA, its private partner Northrop Grumman and state IT staff are in the process of restoring data. The governor noted in his statement that Northrop Grumman and VITA officials have worked 24 hours a day since the failure occurred. “While the part was replaced promptly, significant data in major state agencies was corrupted.” 

There is talk of making Northrop Grumman pay fines to the state for the service interruptions, the second major outage since the giant defense contractor teamed up with VITA in late 2005 to provide computer services to most state agencies.

A spokesman for Northrop Grumman said the company is not commenting on the governor’s call for an independent investigation. 

After a troubled partnership, McDonnell announced a restructuring of the state’s 10-year, $2.3 billion outsourcing contract with Northrop Grumman in April.  The original contract capped Virginia’s cost for services at $236 million annually. The new agreement maintains the cap but extends the deal for three years to 2019.  It also adds $105 million in new costs for hardware upgrades, data storage, helpdesks and other technology services to be paid during the next nine years. In exchange, Virginia released $15 million in payments to Northrop Grumman that had been withheld as part of a billing dispute. 

In July Northrop Grumman announced that it was moving its corporate headquarters from California to Fairfax County and is purchasing an office building there for the move.

The contract is worth up to $120 million, and covers five years if all options are exercised.

Under the contract, Raytheon will operate and maintain engineering services for equipment and software in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory and the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility. The operations provide zero-gravity and partial-gravity training for astronauts.

Raytheon is a subsidiary of Raytheon Co.