It may not have the consistently mild weather, but Central Maryland is shaping up to be the next Silicon Valley.
“We don?t have the fancy name,” said SteveKozak, executive director of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, “but we are being recognized across the country.”
With its biotech, software development and aerospace industries, the region is “literally busting at the seems with technology,” Kozak said.
One word on everyone?s lips when it comes to technology in Central Maryland: informatics — the science of gathering, manipulating, retrieving and analyzing vast amounts of stored information
Michael Dunn, dean of Indiana University?s School of Informatics, said Central Maryland is one of the field?s eminentleaders.
Dunn credits the plethora of federal agencies in the region that rely heavily on the science of informatics, such as the National Security Agency, the Social Security Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the CIA.
“The technology that underlines all the scientific advantages we are seeing ? there is more of that here than anywhere else,” said Steve Walker, chairman of the Maryland-based Informatics Coalition.
Anne Arundel County?s niche in this boom is intelligence and security informatics, since it is home to the NSA and the Chesapeake Innovation Center, the first incubator in the country to focus on homeland security technology firms.
“Our county has become a magnet for the federal government?s efforts to discover knowledge,” said Mark Sauter, chief operating officer of the Chesapeake Innovation Center.
The companies at the center, many of which specialize in intelligence and security informatics, have accounted for more than $100 million in financing and sales since the center launched in late 2003, Sauter said.
Anne Arundel is expecting to gain even more intelligence and security informatics experts when the Defense Information Systems Agency moves to Fort Meade as part of the base realignment and closure.
