James Glover II / Star staff Priscilla Rouse Becker, left, and Cece Alemania of Visual Concepts LLC.

Visual Concepts LLC, a software and system engineering company in Oxnard, was awarded a $29 million contract to provide technical support for the Navy's Naval Facilities Engineering Command in Port Hueneme, a branch of the Navy responsible for handling real estate assets.

As the prime contractor, Visual Concepts will provide 24/7 support to NAVFAC's Information Technology Center and to 30,000 users at naval bases worldwide. The firm will host hundreds of databases and 50-plus applications on more than 400 servers.

Visual Concepts will work with a team of government civilian employees to manage the systems, which track construction project costs, including maintenance, design and personnel.

It's a huge undertaking, said Priscilla Rouse Becker, chief executive and founder of the company.

The five-year contract that started Jan. 1 is the biggest contract landed by Visual Concepts. The small startup is in "growth mode," proving itself as a serious player. The company beat out other small businesses with average annual gross revenue of less than $25 million, said Janet Harouch, manager of Specialty Center Acquisitions, NAVFAC.

As a result, Visual Concepts has doubled in size in the past six months, going from 12 employees to more than 25, said President Cece Alemania. She projects the company will more than double in revenue this year, with the latest contract alone possibly producing $5 million a year.

"It really does take us into the next phase of growth here," Alemania said. "It's like we're in our teenage years as a company; we were in elementary school for a while. Now we're growing, we have great mentors around us, taking us into our next phase."

The company has teamed with the Camarillo and San Diego offices of Northrop Grumman, a $32 billion global defense and technology company with 120,000 employees, the project's primary subcontractor. LJT & Associates Inc., an engineering services provider, also is a subcontractor.

Visual Concepts is required to perform at least half of the work and can subcontract the rest of the work, Harouch said.

The team, primarily an eight-person crew, met almost every day during a six-week period to draft a bid proposal, said Tim Fields, vice president of programs for Visual Concepts and the contract's program manager.

"We had a lot of competition," Fields said, naming General Dynamics and Science Applications International Corp. as the main challengers.

Harouch said she was impressed with their level of management oversight and quality control process, as well as their specialized information technology skills.

"They submitted the best proposal," she said. "They were very strong, from a management and organization standpoint."

Until now, the IT services were provided by multiple contracts from different companies, Rouse Becker said, adding that sourcing the services to one firm will streamline systems and improve quality.

Visual Concepts also is looking at implementing CMMI, or Capability Maturity Model Integration, to build an engine where the hosting environment is depending on the process created by administrators.

"The people are more monitors of that engine, so you remove as much of the human dependency as possible, in the event a person dies or is no longer available," Rouse Becker said.

Visual Concepts has had more than 80 task orders from the Navy, Alemania said.

Four or five years ago, the company built a Web portal, http://www.rebuilding-iraq.net, to track the $18.4 billion that the U.S. provided for construction projects in Iraq. The company is still maintaining that portal, and continues to provide technical support for a military team in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

"We certainly have been exposed to a lot of technology as it related to that contract," Alemania said. "A lot of the technology we used there is one of the major reasons we have this contract now."

On the Net:

http://www.visualconcept.com