Although Hampton Roads health care systems conducted some significant business over the past year, the biggest news was a deal that didn’t happen.
Norfolk-based Sentara Healthcare’s plan to merge with North Carolina-based Cone Health, which was announced in August 2020 and would have created a 17-hospital system with a combined $11.5 billion in annual revenue, was called off in June.
“We realized that each of our communities and key stakeholders require support and commitments from our respective organizations that are better served by remaining independent,” Sentara and Cone Health said in a joint statement.
Health care systems are in better shape financially this year than in 2020, when Gov. Ralph Northam’s executive order prohibited nonemergency surgical procedures for several months. But at the same time, officials are fully aware of the possibility of future instability, even after COVID-19 vaccines have been broadly available.
This summer brought renewed concerns about increases in COVID hospitalizations as the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus spread primarily among unvaccinated people. Virginia’s COVID positivity rate jumped to 10% in late August, up from 1.5% in June.
“We are hopeful about the financial outlook for Sentara but understand that COVID-19 is with us for the long haul and has changed every aspect of the way we live, work and care for others,” former Sentara spokesperson Brittany Vajda said.
Newport News-based Riverside Health System modeled its 2021 budget after its 2019 plan, says CEO Bill Downey, although revenue is still not back to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, Riverside has seen treatments and services return to close to normal activity this year.
Partnerships among hospital systems and universities continued over the past
12 months. The Hampton Roads Biomedical Research Consortium, a collaboration among Sentara, Old Dominion University and Eastern Virginia Medical School, launched in late 2020. Sentara also pledged $4 million toward the establishment of Virginia’s first school of public health, a joint initiative between EVMS, ODU and Norfolk State University. The schools signed a memorandum of understanding in August, solidifying plans for the school.
Sentara is among a group of 14 health care systems nationwide that formed a new company, Truveta, which will offer data insights for patient care, the systems, including Bon Secours, announced in February. Truveta is creating a data platform using artificial intelligence and machine learning that will let health care systems learn from one another and provide larger study samples than each could accomplish individually.
In May, Sentara also became among the first health systems in Virginia to raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour, joining UVA Health, which implemented the $15 minimum wage in January. (The federally mandated minimum wage is $7.25; Virginia’s state-mandated minimum wage is scheduled to rise to $11 on Jan. 1, 2022.)
The wage increase impacted about 5,700 Hampton Roads-area workers, Sentara said last year. The health care system employs more than 28,000 people in Virginia and North Carolina.
“From a business perspective, one of the important things is that we have great talent in the commonwealth,” Becky Sawyer, executive vice president and chief people officer for Sentara Healthcare, told Virginia Business in May. “The recruiting process is very expensive. It is much more cost-effective to pay a person a reasonable salary.”
Before last year’s pandemic shutdowns, 24-year-old Julia Swanson had been commuting from Newport News to her job as a civil engineer for the Virginia Beach office of Kimley-Horn, a national engineering firm headquartered in North Carolina.
It could take 35 minutes to an hour and a half traveling only one way, and Swanson says she often pulled up Google Maps to see what she could expect.
Sometimes she took the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, while other days she chose the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel.
The region’s average commute time in 2019 was just over 24 minutes one way, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and it has remained fairly steady over the past decade.
While that doesn’t sound so bad, the Census also estimated that 12.4% of people living in the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News metro area have a regular round-trip commute of 45 minutes or longer. Nearly 2% of that group is on the road for 90 minutes or longer on workdays.
For four glorious months in 2020, Swanson’s commute was not an issue. Her gas costs dwindled to nothing, she walked everywhere, and she could still get all her work done. “It was really nice. I was able to work out, I was able to do stuff for my life, I was planning a wedding,” she says.
But in July 2020, Kimley-Horn asked workers to return to the office. Because she was new, Swanson decided to go back full time, instead of taking advantage of a flex option to work occasionally from home.
Old Dominion University public affairs and media relations lecturer Brendan O’Hallarn lives in Williamsburg, his wife’s hometown, and puts in a 42-mile one-way daily commute to Norfolk that sometimes takes more than an hour.
It was brutal for his first eight years on the job, driving “into the teeth of rush hour,” O’Hallarn says, until 2017 when he was able to set his own teaching schedule. He learned that a 10-minute difference in departure time could determine what he would face on the road. “I felt like traffic was in control and that was just a byproduct of where I chose to live and where I chose to work.”
Like Swanson, the pandemic shutdown was an oasis of sorts for O’Hallarn. “The difference between a commute of 9 feet from my bedroom to our office and 42 miles is significant and something I’ve been thinking about,” he says.
Many people like Swanson and O’Hallarn are now pondering what it would be like with a more flexible work schedule — this time for good.
“I think if you can do your job effectively and efficiently at home, there should be an option for every day to be [working] at home,” Swanson says. “If you can do your job effectively, completely at home, you eliminate the traffic.”
While O’Hallarn loves being on a college campus, he is less patient about traffic than he used to be and uses Zoom for meetings on days he doesn’t teach.
Although employers are deciding whether to require in-person work vs. a remote or hybrid approach, workers hope that more options will lessen their commuting headaches.
That could wind up affecting Hampton Roads’ traffic planning as well.
Road work, of course, is a near constant in the region.
Over the next 24 years, the Hampton Roads region expects to receive $30.7 billionfrom federal, state, regional and local sources to invest in the region’s transportation system. Of that, $17 billion is to maintain the existing system and $13.7 billion is to improve it. The majority of the funds for new and additional capacity construction, such as new interstate lanes, comes from the regional Hampton Roads Transportation Fund, which is funded with proceeds from regional surcharges on sales and use taxes and fuel taxes.
Among the region’s major road projects is the largest transportation infrastructure project in state history — the $3.8 billion expansion of the HRBT, which was started last October. Additionally, the Virginia Department of Transportation is widening Interstate 64 on the Peninsula and the southside, adding a two-lane tunnel to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and making improvements to the I-64/I-264 interchange.
Projects such as these are guided by the Hampton Roads Long-Range Transportation Plan, the 20-year blueprint updated every five years to reflect changing conditions, such as population and employment growth, anticipated travel demand, new technology and environmental changes. The 2045 plan was just adopted this summer.
One change, says Dale Stith, a principal transportation planner for the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, was a shift toward incorporating plans for different scenarios, including sea-level rise and autonomous vehicles. But significant numbers of people working from home was not part of the group’s considerations, Stith notes.
If the Hampton Roads region sees a big change in the number of people working from home over a longer period, Stith says, traffic planners will take that into account in the future.
“So many different drivers can change how we get around and how we travel,” she notes. “This pandemic has highlighted another potential that changes travel behavior — working from home and not going to an office space.”
It’s no secret that the hospitality industry is hurting from the ongoing pandemic. Although widespread shutdowns are in the past, hotel executives are now challenged by the sector’s labor shortage and the slow recovery of business travel. In July, hotel revenues were down 3% compared with the same month in 2019, according to data from STR Inc., a CoStar Group division that provides market data on the U.S. hospitality industry.
Although tourism travel returned to pre-pandemic levels in Virginia Beach this summer, business and government travel continues to lag, notes Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association President Eric Terry.
Hotels continue to adapt, though, adding technology to enable hybrid meetings and updating safety protocols, with many hotels and conference centers focusing on outdoor meeting areas that are considered safer by public health officials. Many also have continued with renovations and grand openings despite the current challenges.
Here’s the latest around the state:
Marriott Virginia Beach Oceanfront seaside terrace
Central Virginia
The 18-story downtown Richmond Marriott’s multimillion-dollar renovations were finished in December. The 410-room hotel has a skywalk to the Greater Richmond Convention Center and offers six event rooms and 24 breakout rooms. Its meeting space totals 26,700 square feet, and the largest space holds 2,000 people. The ballroom can be set up for virtual meetings. On Sept. 23, comfort food restaurant Fall Line Kitchen & Bar opened in the hotel.
In eastern Albemarle County, Keswick Hall was set to reopen in October following extensive renovations. The hotel has 80 guest rooms and suites, a golf course, a new spa and a new restaurant, Marigold, from French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The resort’s boardroom can accommodate 20 people and teleconferences, and the ballroom can be divided to hold a general session and breakout space for up to 200 people.
Hampton Roads
The $125 million Marriott Virginia Beach Oceanfront opened in June 2020 as part of Gold Key | PHR’s Cavalier Resort, an expansion of the Historic Cavalier Hotel & Beach Club. With 305 guest rooms, 11 meeting rooms and a total of 20,300 square feet of event space, including a ballroom overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, the hotel is a prominent addition to the Oceanfront area. The hotel’s amenities include a business center, boardroom and breakout room. The resort’s outdoor spaces — seven lawns and the beach — have grown in popularity, Gold Key CEO Bruce Thompson says, as have team-building exercises.
“They do everything from different athletic-type events to scavenger hunts to meetings on the lawns to all types of activities,” Thompson says. “We give them little metal detectors and they go out and try to find things on the beach that we plant or coins or something like that.”
Gold Key’s properties — the two hotels at The Cavalier Resort and Hilton Norfolk The Main — offer three conference options, a mixture of in-person and virtual meetings. Both locations require employees to either have proof of vaccination or wear masks.
The six-story Sheraton Reston reopened Aug. 6 after completing renovations to its nine event rooms and 12 breakout rooms that total 18,600 square feet. The largest space can hold 550 people. Additions include a courtyard, a new 1,800-square-foot gym and a media room and studio.
Located 12 miles from Washington Dulles International Airport, the Landsdowne Resort and Spa in Leesburg recently renovated its ballroom and meeting spaces. The resort offers 55,000 square feet of meeting space, including an outdoor pavilion, and leisure activities like golf and spa treatments.
Shenandoah Valley
The 483-room Omni Homestead Resort in Bath County reopened in June 2020 after closing for three months due to the pandemic. One of the state’s oldest businesses, The Homestead has been open since 1766 and was purchased by Omni in 2013. After a couple of years’ delay and following extensive renovations, the hotel’s former Jefferson Pools — now known as the Warm Springs Pools — owned by the Homestead are expected to reopen in late 2022.
The 2,300-acre resort offers 23 meeting rooms with a total of 72,000 square feet, although John Hess, Homestead’s director of marketing and sales, says that its outdoor venues have become more popular in the past year, as have team-building activities. Hotel staff also worked with organizers to host virtual meetings.
Blue Ridge Conference Center at Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center
“It seems that the desire to get out and travel is currently outweighing any fears that are out there of holding a meeting during this pandemic,” Hess says, “but I think that dynamic is starting to shift,” as cases rise due to the coronavirus’ delta variant.
Roanoke/Southwest Virginia
The Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center, part of the Curio Collection by Hilton, completed the $3.6 million renovation of its Pine Room Pub and 1882 Lobby Bar in September 2020. The hotel has 63,000 square feet of meeting space composed of 34 meeting areas and a 14,400-square-foot ballroom. A significant chunk of the budget — $480,000 — went into updated infrastructure and equipment to allow hybrid meetings.
In Bristol, the Nicewonder Inn is expected to open in late fall at the Nicewonder Farm & Vineyards. A 28-room lakefront boutique inn, the property is focused on fine dining (with James Beard-nominated Chef Travis Milton opening a restaurant, Hickory, on premises) and can host 300 or more guests inside or outdoors.
The Nicewonder Inn is expected to open in late fall at the Nicewonder Farm & Vineyards in Bristol.
Southern Virginia
The Bee, a boutique hotel, opened to guests last December in the former Danville Register & Bee newspaper office. The conversion preserved features such as the original wood floors and the spiral staircase that led from the pressroom to the editor’s office. With 47 guest rooms and a rooftop veranda, The Bee offers a mix of old and new in downtown Danville.
Plans for constructing a $1.9 billion, two-track railroad bridge connecting Virginia to Washington, D.C. — doubling the number of tracks going across the Potomac River from the U.S. capital to the commonwealth — are chugging right along.
“We’re now moving forward to advance the engineering design and that should be completed by 2023,” says Jennifer Mitchell, director of the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT).
Massachusetts-based civil engineering firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc. won the $21 million contract to complete preliminary engineering on the Long Bridge project. Construction is expected to begin in 2024 with completion expected by 2030, according to DRPT spokesperson Haley Glynn.
That day can’t come soon enough for riders on commuter and regional passenger rail.
The current Long Bridge, which is 117 years old, is the sole rail connection between Virginia and D.C. Owned and operated by CSX Transportation, the bridge often functions at 98% capacity. When more than two trains need to use the bridge, any additional trains must wait until the tracks are clear, according to Glynn.
The new two-track bridge will be owned by DRPT and will run parallel to the existing bridge, which will be used solely for freight trains. “Separating passenger and freight traffic will help alleviate the rail congestion,” Glynn said in a statement.
Mitchell estimates that with the addition of the new tracks, the corridor will serve 18,000 new freight and passenger train crossings annually — which could take 1 million trucks and 5 million cars off highways each year.
The project will be funded via a mix of state and federal funds as well as through partnerships with Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Amtrak, according to DRPT spokesperson Haley Glynn.
Amtrak has pledged $944 million to the Transforming Rail in Virginia plan, a $3.9 billion initiative designed to expand passenger, commuter and freight rail in Virginia through agreements between the state government, CSX, VRE and Amtrak. Completion of the Long Bridge Project is a cornerstone of the plan, which also includes goals such as doubling Amtrak service in the state.
The federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which passed the U.S. Senate in August but had an uncertain future in the House as of mid-September, included $66 billion for passenger rail — money that could help fund the Long Bridge project, according to U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine’s office. “Federal funding is still critically needed for this project to move forward,” Kaine says.
As he completed his senior project last spring at Old Dominion University’s Batten College of Engineering & Technology, Kristal Sunuwar researched the development of the global offshore wind industry.
Learning how China, South Korea, Japan and European nations had developed their offshore wind programs, Sunuwar reached an unexpected conclusion: “I was surprised that the USA wasn’t farther ahead” in offshore wind development, he says. He was also struck by how much more cumbersome the governmental approval process for offshore wind projects appeared to be in the U.S. versus other countries.
Now holding a part-time position at ODU in developing offshore wind courses for future workers, Sunuwar says, “If we could make the federal process more streamlined, I think we could get it done a little bit faster.”
Questions such as these are driving work at ODU, in partnership with other educational, government and business entities, to establish a supply chain hub centered in Virginia for the burgeoning offshore wind industry along the East Coast.
In April 2020, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which requires Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power to generate all electricity for Virginia from carbon-free sources by 2045 and 2050 respectively. Meanwhile, Richmond-based Dominion Energy Inc. is working through the approval process for its 2.64-gigawatt, $7.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. It will include about 180 wind turbines and produce enough power for up to 660,000 homes when completed by 2026.
Also, in 2019, officials with ODU and the state Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy —rebranded as of Oct. 1 as the Virginia Department of Energy (Virginia Energy)—signed a memorandum of understanding for the state’s offshore wind projects, including Dominion’s wind farm.
As part of that agreement, ODU has organized the Commonwealth Offshore Wind Task Force, which brings together more than 200 partners from across the state to examine all aspects of building a brand-new industry — from workforce pipeline needs to supply-chain capability, to how offshore wind would interact with Virginia’s existing maritime industries.
Paul Olsen, executive director of programs and partnerships for ODU’s office of research, co-leads the task force with Jennifer Palestrant of Virginia Energy. As a former commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Norfolk District, Olsen sees offshore wind as the next big “megaproject” that will demand the focus of the entire Hampton Roads region.
Matt Smith, who leads offshore wind business development for the Hampton Roads Alliance, says the task force is “probably the longest ongoing effort to focus on different areas that need work to be done to make Virginia one of the hubs of the industry.”
Olsen’s approach to building the task force mirrors work he did to organize university efforts to address sea level rise when he arrived at Old Dominion in 2015. But as he works to raise funds for ODU’s research efforts, Olsen notes that the business case for offshore wind is much clearer.
“Until we monetize the cost of a milli-meter of sea level rise,” he says, it’s harder to make the case for research funding. “With offshore wind, you can monetize your progress, because you can put a price tag on a kilowatt hour.”
A decade in the making
Making the case that offshore wind presents an economically viable piece of the commonwealth’s energy picture has been part of ODU’s role since 2006, when the General Assembly established the Virginia Coastal Energy Research Consortium (VCERC).
Headquartered at ODU, VCERC brought together researchers from Virginia Tech, James Madison University, William & Mary, Norfolk State University, Hampton University, the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University.
In its 2010 final report, VCERC researchers reported that with carbon reduction measures expected to increase the cost of coal-fired energy, new offshore wind farms could yield lower energy costs than new coal-fired power plants.
VCERC recommended that Virginia apply for a research lease to conduct a demonstration project on the potential for offshore wind off the Virginia coast to be an economically viable renewable energy source.
“Before that, nobody had even suggested that offshore wind should be in Virginia’s energy future,” says George Hagerman, senior project scientist at ODU’s Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography. “That really catalyzed everything that has happened since.”
At the time the report was released, Hagerman was a senior research associate at Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Institute. He says ODU’s strengths in electrical engineering and oceanography were particularly valuable in the offshore wind research.
Hagerman joined the faculty at ODU in 2018.
He teamed with ODU chemistry and biochemistry professor Pat Hatcher — who chaired VCERC — and oceanographer Larry Atkinson, an esteemed member of the ODU faculty who died in January, to make presentations to the Virginia legislature and to Dominion Energy about offshore wind’s potential.
That work helped inform Dominion’s development of the CVOW project — the first offshore wind farm in U.S. federal waters.
Dominion installed a two-turbine, 12-megawatt pilot project off the coast of Virginia Beach in summer 2020. The utility plans to begin construction on the larger wind farm in 2024.
Supporting a new industry
As interest in offshore wind has increased, the capacity to review the construction and operation plans for these giant infrastructure projects has struggled to keep up. This created a backlog of plans at the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).
When U.S. Sen. Mark Warner held a meeting on the issue in February, Olsen suggested that BOEM make use of a federal authority that allows the Army Corps of Engineers to provide interagency help for critical infrastructure projects. The idea led to an agreement between BOEM and the Corps that has sped up federal reviews for offshore wind farms.
“This is an ODU contribution that is going to unlock the industry between Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras,” Hagerman says.
The university also is helping forge connections as the Hampton Roads business community strives to present itself as an attractive place for wind-energy-related businesses to locate — key to establishing a supply chain that can support offshore wind development along the East Coast.
In May, ODU’s OpenSeas Technology Innovation Hub partnered with the Hampton Roads Alliance and the then-Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy to open the Virginia Offshore Wind Landing. A coworking space located in Norfolk’s World Trade Center, Virginia Offshore Wind Landing is meant to be a collaborative space for offshore wind-related companies hoping to learn more about the region.
“It’s really a place where companies who are exploring the market in Hampton Roads have a place to get connected to resources, have meeting space [and] hold events,” says Smith.
He hopes to work with ODU’s Jerry Cronin, who heads the OpenSeas Technology Innovation Hub, to develop programming that can help connect smaller companies with federal agencies and larger players in the offshore wind industry.
“We see the relationship with ODU as a way to promote innovation and thought leadership,” he says.
George Hagerman of ODU’s Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography says Dominion Energy’s twin-turbine pilot wind farm is a fertile ground for research.
Research and education
Hagerman sees the twin pilot wind turbines Dominion installed last summer as a rich bed for research into all aspects of offshore wind in Virginia.
In summer 2020, ODU, in partnership with William & Mary and James Madison University, won a $775,000 Department of Defense grant that will support research to mitigate the effects of wind farm locations on military training, readiness and research.
Hagerman and Olsen both have a long list of research topics for which they’re seeking funding. Their aim is to find ways to help reduce the cost of energy generated from offshore wind farms, to reduce the safety risks to people working on offshore wind projects and to reduce risk to the marine environment.
Olsen is actively seeking funding for research on extending the life of wind turbines, using autonomous vehicles to reduce the risk to wind farm maintenance workers, and optimizing turbine design, placement and positioning to harvest more energy.
“We would love to partner with industry,” Olsen says. “We can solve problems for business that ultimately reduce the cost of the kilowatt hour.”
Momentum around offshore wind also poses a workforce challenge.
To that end, Centura College in Virginia Beach and Thomas Nelson and Tidewater community colleges have begun offering offshore wind technician training courses.
Rema McManus, offshore wind program specialist with ODU’s Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography, traveled to the New College Institute in Martinsville in January to earn the Basic Safety Training certification offered through the Global Wind Organisation.
“I wanted to know firsthand what technicians go through,” she says. The experience opened her eyes to the fact that many skills that already exist in the Hampton Roads workforce — such as those needed to operate cranes at the port — could translate to offshore wind.
Both Smith and Hampton Roads Workforce Council President and CEO Shawn Avery say that as community colleges and technical schools train workers for offshore wind industry construction and technician jobs, ODU can play a role in educating people who could become managers and engineers in the industry.
“We are developing a brand-new industry,” Avery says. “What about the management levels, the engineering levels, the human resources behind the companies? That is where ODU will shine.”
Orlando Ayala, an ODU associate professor of mechanical engineering, is working on a National Science Foundation grant proposal to develop a graduate-level program that could train engineers in all aspects of renewable energy — from the mechanics of offshore wind to the business and geopolitical forces that govern its development.
He worked with colleagues to adapt an existing undergraduate course on energy and the environment to include lecturers working on current renewable energy projects in Virginia, including solar, biomass and Dominion’s offshore wind project.
The course debuted this past summer. Ayala’s hope is for ODU to establish a clear pipeline for students who complete technical coursework that brings them into the industry to continue to build their skills with undergraduate and graduate work at the university.
“We have to create courses that adapt to the needs of the industry,” he says.
At a glance
Founded
Old Dominion University was founded in 1930 as an extension of William & Mary and Virginia Tech. The school gained independent status in 1962 as Old Dominion College. Old Dominion began offering master’s degrees in 1964 and doctoral degrees in 1971. It was renamed Old Dominion University in 1969.
Campus
Old Dominion’s 335-acre Norfolk campus is bordered on two sides by the Elizabeth and Lafayette rivers. The school also operates regional higher educational centers in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Hampton.
Enrollment1
Undergraduate: 19,372
Graduate: 4,804
In-state: 21,360 (88%)
International: 617 (2.5%)
Students of color: 11,620 (49%)
Employees
3,062
Faculty
901 full-time
Tuition and fees
In-state tuition and fees: $11,160
Tuition and fees (out of state):
$31,320
Room and board and other fees:
$11,523
Average financial aid awarded
to full-time freshmen seeking
assistance: $11,797
1 2020-21 enrollment statistics
This article has been clarified since publication.
Fortune 500 IT services company DXC Technology is leaving Tysons for a smaller headquarters in Ashburn in November, the company announced this week.
DXC’s new 10,000-square-foot building is located at One Loudoun in Ashburn.
The new corporate headquarters will reflect the shift to a virtual-first mentality. Employees can work from anywhere and use the office as more of a place to come together. It’s designed around collaboration, executives say.
DXC started thinking about being virtual-first before the pandemic, said Chris Drumgoole, DXC’s chief operating officer.
“As I joined just under two years ago…we were really stepping back and saying, ‘Hey, what do we want the future of the company to be and how do we want to attract talent, what do we think our footprint should be environmentally, kind of like the big picture. We’re a technology company at heart and can we act like one?'” Drumgoole said Wednesday in an interview with Virginia Business.
It’s almost entirely meeting and conference space, with offices for key executive officers.
“We are reimagining our new local corporate office in Ashburn to be a modern, open, and inspiring workplace to foster both in-office and remote collaboration among colleagues, and with customers, while providing multiple activity-based spaces and state-of-the-art technology and meeting rooms,” DXC spokesman Rich Adamonis said in a statement.
DXC has several hundred employees in the greater Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia area; some will work on site and others will have access when needed. Fewer will work there on a permanent basis.
“Over the past two years, as we looked at ways to improve employee engagement and experience, we have moved to a virtual first environment locally and globally,” Adamonis said in a statement. “Today, approximately 99% of DXC’s global workforce is equipped to work virtual first. Ours is a now largely distributed, remote workplace where our people throughout the world are enabled to work remotely and flexibly and, when needed, to access purpose-built offices—whatever best fits their needs.”
DXC has more than 130,000 employees worldwide.
The company was founded in 2017 after the merger of Computer Science Corp. and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Corp. In October 2020, DXC finalized the sale of its health business to Veritas Capital for $5 billion, which the company planned to use to reduce its debt by about $3.5 billion. Last week, DXC completed its refinancing actions, according to a news release from the company.
In fiscal 2021, the company had $17.7 billion in revenue.
Herndon-based federal Peraton Inc. announced this week it has been awarded a contract worth up to $109 million by the U.S. Cyber Command, a project that will deliver full-spectrum cyberspace operations for the Department of Defense.
The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity Cyberspace Operations Support Services task order could last four years, the company said in a news release Tuesday. Peraton, which employs about 22,000 people in more than 90 locations, would support the command’s directorate of operations, the Cyber National Mission Force and Joint Task Force ARES, strengthening the DoD’s information network. The company has worked with the command since 2016.
“Peraton is proud to continue our work partnering with the DoD to improve the nation’s ability to withstand and respond to cyberattacks,” Tom Afferton, president of Peraton’s cyber mission sector, said in a statement.
Earlier in the year, Peraton acquired Chantilly-based federal IT contractor Perspecta Inc. for $7.1 billion and Northrop Grumman Corp.’s federal IT and mission support services business for $3.4 billion. The company grew out of Veritas Capital’s 2017 acquisition of the former government services business Harris Corp.
Fluence Energy Inc., an Arlington-based energy storage and digital application company owned by Siemens and AES Corp., announced this week it has filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of its Class A common stock.
The number of shares and price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, according to a news release from the company Tuesday. J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Barclays Capital Inc. and BofA Securities will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering, the company said, and IPO will be made through a prospectus.
Fluence, which was founded in 2018 as a joint venture of Arlington-based Fortune 500 energy company AES and industrial manufacturer Siemens, announced late last year that the Qatar Investment Authority will invest $125 million in the company, with AES and Siemens retaining approximately 44% shares each of the company. Fluence has more than 3.4 gigawatts of energy storage in 29 markets globally, and more than 4.5 gigawatts of wind, solar and storage assets in Australia and California.
Alpine-X LLC, a McLean-based indoor snow sports company, announced a crowdfunding campaign to open the stock to public investors.
The offering — started on crowdfunding site Republic — allows accredited and non-accredited investors to own a piece of the McLean-based company that is planning a national chain of indoor ski resorts. So far, more than 100 people — known as “snow moguls” — have signed up as investors, CEO John Emery said Wednesday afternoon, and the company has raised more than $170,000.
According to the fundraising page, the company is valued at $40 million, and its funding goal is up to $5 million, with a maximum investment per investor of $500,000. The deadline to sign up is Jan. 15, 2022.
In May, Alpine-X released details of Fairfax Peak, a $200 million indoor ski resort proposed to be built on parts of the I-95 Landfill Complex in Lorton. The 450,000-square-foot indoor snow sports facility will have a 1,700-foot ski slope and 100-plus room luxury hotel and is expected to open in 2025. Emery and Chief Financial Officer Jim Calder were previously the CEO and CFO of Great Wolf Resorts Inc.
Over the past two weeks, Alpine-X has held two community events — one in person, one on Zoom — drawing more than 450 people, Emery said. The project is still going through the zoning and approvals process with Fairfax County officials.
“The level of interest in the community is well beyond our expectation this early in the process,” Emery said. The response to the stock offering, or crowdfunding, has been good, he added. “It’s a chance for people to have an investment in something local.”
The company plans to use net proceeds from the stock offering to fund early development costs of the first resort and plans for new markets around North America.
Emery said the next two or three proposed sites across the U.S. and Canada are in the works, but did not specify where they are yet. He said each location will roll out 12-18 months after the one before it opens.
Investors will be offered perks to the resorts, such as discounts on merchandise and lift tickets, early access to events, meetings with the founders and limited-edition apparel.
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The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
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This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
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The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
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The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
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