Suffolk-based tech company teams up with Earl Industries

By Jon W. Glass
The Virginian-Pilot

PORTSMOUTH

Earl Industries has been moving to expand its business beyond Navy ship repair. Echo-Storm, a small technology company with big ambitions, has needed capital to grow.

In a deal meant to achieve both goals, Earl and Echo-Storm said Thursday that the two companies have formed a joint venture called Echo-Storm Worldwide LLC. Under the agreement, Suffolk-based EchoStorm has become an Earl subsidiary and is operating as part of the Earl Technology Group, a division created by Earl in the past 18 months.

EchoStorm, founded in 2003 by brothers David and Jason Barton, has an approximately $7 million contract with the military's Joint Forces Command, using its technology to collect and distribute near-real-time video from unmanned aerial vehicles being flown in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jerry Miller, Earl's president, said his Portsmouth ship repair company, which operates an Elizabeth River shipyard, owns a majority stake in the new venture.

Miller said he was impressed with EchoStorm's work with the Defense Department and the potential the company's digital content-management technology holds for other government and commercial customers.

"I thought what they were doing was important for the war fighter and had tremendous potential," Miller said. "We saw it as a great addition that would really accelerate the growth of our business into the technology world."

Jason Barton said Earl's "multi million-dollar investment" in EchoStorm enabled it to ramp up for the Joint Forces contract, allowing the company to move into larger offices and hire more employees. EchoStorm, he said, now has a work force of about 75, up from around 25 last summer, and plans to add more.

The investment also has allowed the company to develop a spinoff commercial version of its video management software. The system being used by the military was developed in collaboration with government researchers to meet specific war-fighter needs. The commercial version, Barton said, has different features developed by EchoStorm.

The system would allow information to be captured by video and other data-collecting processes and transmitted, stored and catalog ed over a secure Web-based network.

"Now it's a software product that we can sell just like Micro-soft sells Microsoft Word," Barton said. "We needed to build that on our own money and not government money to steer clear of any potential ownership or intellectual property issues."

Barton said EchoStorm recently opened offices in London, Washington and San Francisco. "Those are things we just could not have done without Earl," he said.

Jon W. Glass, (757) 446-2318, jon.glass@pilotonline.com