HCEDA Celebrates 15 Years at Annual Meeting

The Howard County Economic Development Authority (HCEDA) recently celebrated 15 years of achievement and service to the business community. To mark the occasion, five county businesses were honored with Economic Development Achievement Awards during the authority's 15th Annual Meeting and Report to Investors at Ten Oaks Ballroom in Clarksville.
Each year, companies are recognized for their contributions to enhancing the economy and quality of life in Howard County. Those chosen have demonstrated a strong commitment to corporate leadership and community development.
"All of these companies have made an outstanding contribution to the economy and quality of life in Howard County," said HCEDA Chair Mike Galeone. "We are honored to have them as a part of Howard County. It has been our pleasure to present them with Economic Achievement Awards on this illustrious occasion."
This year's winners are:

INTECORP: INTECORP, located in Howard County's Center for Business and Technology Development, offers support in network engineering, e-mail systems, Internet and e-commerce, security, application development, data warehousing, help desk support and training. In May, INTECORP signed a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract with the U.S. Department of Labor for designing additions and modifications to the department's web site, as well as supporting and improving its searchable databases. INTECORP rolled out its newest online platform, VioSync, a revolutionary Web 3.0 collaborative platform for online media.

E-Structors: E-Structors specializes in the secure destruction and recycling of computers, electronics and documents. In 2004, a document destruction line was added to the company's services, making it the only firm in the country that handles electronics and document destruction. E-Structors further separates itself from the industry by recycling 100% of the resulting material to be used for future products. It recently relocated its headquarters to a new facility at 7575 Washington Boulevard in Elkridge. The 93,000-square-foot building houses its 50 employees.

BioFortis: BioFortis, a Columbia-based biomedical informatics company, provides research data management software solutions for multi-disciplinary users at academic and government research institutes, as well as biotech and pharmaceutical companies. BioFortis makes personalized medicine a reality by helping save time and money, thereby reducing administrative burden, redundant efforts, and complexity in both data management and query.

Sun Nurseries: Located in Woodbine, Sun Nurseries is a family-owned and operated wholesale grower of annuals and perennials. Sun Nurseries has set the standard for nursery management using systematic approaches that can be seen from its use of a CAD system to design landscapes linking directly to a point-of-sale system, to the use of green technology providing water catchment systems that continually recycle "gray water" for reuse. Sun Nurseries has more than 2,000 varieties of plants (trees, shrubs, ornamental grasses, perennials, and more) on its 20-acre site along Bushy Park Road.

Integral Systems: Integral Systems, a leading provider of satellite ground systems, will relocate its headquarters and approximately 250 of its employees from Lanham to the Columbia Gateway Business Park. The five-story, 130,000-square-foot building will be LEED certified. Currently, Integral Systems owns four subsidiaries that provide a wide range of services and products to the satellite industry.