A Md. software company’s battlefield beginnings

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On the surface, it’s no surprise that an office run by military veterans would have Nerf guns strewn about and Nerf bullets peeking out from window shades and stuck to the ceiling.

But for BTS Software Solutions, whose Columbia, office also boasts pingpong and Foosball tables amid plenty of open space, frequent Nerf battles are just part of the company culture.

Winner of the Chesapeake Regional Tech Council’s 2015 Innovator Award and a finalist for August’s SmartCEO Magazine’s Cornerstone Awards, BTS S-2 says it strives to remain true to its core mission of providing service, from soldiers in the field to hearing-impaired students in the classroom.

David Tohn, the company’s CEO is a retired colonel with six combat deployments, but as the overseer of a software startup he admits he initially was a bit out of his element.

“The culture that the company grew up with as a fast, exciting startup — [management has] tried to keep that in place as much as possible,” Tohn said, which helps explain the office’s heavy Nerf presence. “We’ve had to adjust our personalities as much as we can to match the company personality.”

Management comprises three veterans: Tohn and brothers Dan and Craig Cummings, the company’s COO and co-founder, respectively, the three of whom bought out the company earlier this year to assume operating control. Due to the management change, BTS S-2 has filed to become a certified service-disabled veteran-owned small business, a classification that gives businesses special consideration when bidding for government contracts.

In the field

BTS S-2 got its start on a government contract, when a pair of former intelligence officers realized the need for 3G cellular networks in Afghanistan; they developed what is essentially a small portable box capable of facilitating quick communication in the field.

Originally, the company was “all about army, all about advanced communication,” Tohn said. But the withdrawal from Afghanistan and other government cutbacks hit BTS S-2’s bottom line hard last year, removing 25 percent of the company’s revenue and catalyzing a shift in focus from government to commercial services.

Currently, the company does about 75 percent government work and 25 percent non-government; Tohn said he’d like those percentages to flip in the next 18 months.

“Commercial [is] more agile, it can be more lucrative, and frankly, it’s just more interesting because you can be a creative engineer,” he added.

‘Pool of expertise’

The company’s MO is to develop software or an algorithm and apply it to a variety of fields, thereby taking advantage of the breadth of knowledge in the office.

There is “a pool of R&D expertise that we have,” Tohn said, citing the company’s four PhDs and 30 patents. “To have that much intellectual firepower … we think we’re pretty special to be able to apply that to problems and think beyond just what we’re doing today.”

That process is evident in the evolution of transcription service Verb8tm, the company’s newest commercial project, which provides 99.6 percent accuracy in transcribing NPR’s national programming. Beyond radio, Tohn listed a number of fields where the algorithm could be used: post-production for recorded TV shows, reality programming, lectures and conferences, and academia.

The latter demand has become Verb8tm’s priority. This application is “near and dear” to the heart of Ellyn Sheffield, a research professor at Towson University, who founded the project and has become the vice president of Verb8tm with BTS S-2 since the software company became involved.

Blending in

At Towson, Sheffield had taught hearing-impaired students who resisted asking for help because they wanted to blend in with the rest of the class.

With the live-transcription service, students can “look at the captioning in the privacy of their own seat,” Sheffield said. “They can do it on their iPhone, their iPad, their laptop. They don’t have to look different from any other students. That was kind of one of those miracles of technology.”

After all, students are going to be looking at technology during class anyway. “Instead of sitting on Facebook and daydreaming, they can go and see their captioning,” Sheffield added.

And the daydreaming can be confined to BTS S-2’s office, where Tohn is happy to let his team of creative coders plug away. And perhaps get a game of pingpong or a Nerf battle going while they’re at it.