General Dynamics Information Technology is moving to Port San Antonio, the third technology company in recent weeks to open a facility on the campus to be near clients at Joint Base San Antonio.
The company, a subsidiary of Virginia-based aerospace and defense contracting giant General Dynamics, already employed 20 people serving clients in the 16th Air Force and the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, both of which are located at JBSA-Lackland. The company is announcing Tuesday that it plans to move 50 employees and more new hires to an 11,000-square-foot facility at the Port.
“Port San Antonio is now becoming a central hub for cyber, information security and advanced technologies and obviously we want to take advantage of that environment and also what potential synergies can come from being co-located with like companies,” Peter Lambert, vice president of the General Dynamics Information Technology’s C5ISR business area, whose portfolio includes the Air Force, said in an interview before the news was announced.
RELATED: Leidos Holdings says it’s hiring 100 IT workers with top secret clearance at Port San Antonio
C5ISR is General Dynamics shorthand for command, control, communications, computers, combat systems, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It develops and integrates software and IT equipment for the Air Force cyber programs and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance.
“Because of the attractiveness of the San Antonio facility, we are looking at other opportunities … to operate from this location and the talented workforce that’s available for us to recruit from down in this area,” Lambert said.
The arrival of General Dynamics is the latest in Port San Antonio’s efforts to fill its 1,900-acre campus with technology companies, most with business ties to the intelligence community and military clients at JBSA and elsewhere in the city.
The campus now has more than 80 tenants and 18,000 employees, the largest slice of the city’s technology workforce. That number continues to grow as the city gains recognition for having the nation’s largest cybersecurity workforce outside of Washington, D.C.
Port San Antonio CEO Jim Perschbach last week said General Dynamics Information Technology “is the third very very capable, very in demand technology to set up shop here in the past five weeks.”
“Each one represents really a pinnacle within their industry,” he said. “General Dynamics is a get. It has both a brute force capability since it’s a really large organization and has a large connectivity to the industry side of the IT world.”
Perschbach said General Dynamics employees last month began moving into a renovated facility near the city of San Antonio’s 20,000-square-foot Alamo Regional Security Operations Center, which was launched in 2021.
RELATED: Maryland-based IntelliGenesis the latest cybersecurity company to join Port San Antonio
Last month, IntelliGenesis, a Maryland-based cybersecurity provider to the Defense Department and intelligence community, announced it would rotate three employees in a 5,000-square-foot space shared with Austin-based accelerator Capital Factory’s Center for Defense Innovation program in the Boeing Center at Tech Port. The company already has 10 employees working at government facilities.
Two weeks ago, Leidos Holdings Inc., a Virginia-based information-technology and engineering company, announced it had been moved into a 15,000-square-foot facility in June and planned to hire 100 employees to work with the Air Force and the Defense Department at large. It already had about 1,000 employees in the city, most of them working at OTC Management, a subsidiary that provides medical exams for veterans, federal employees and other industry.
Lambert, a retired Air Force major general who served as assistant deputy chief of staff, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance at the Pentagon, said he began speaking with Perschbach more than a year ago about moving the company to the campus on the South Side. The company’s health unit is based at JBSA-Fort Sam Houston on the East Side.
“Everybody knows that there’s a hub of military presence in San Antonio,” Lambert said. “Port San Antonio is filling the void that Kelly Air Force Base vacated, and the facilities being developed there are fantastic. It’s as close as we can be with the customers. It’s all very attractive.”
San Antonio is “a lot cheaper” than Washington, D.C., he added, and San Antonio International Airport provides “easy access” for company leaders and workers from other technology hubs on the coasts.
General Dynamics, the parent company, employs about 100,000 workers across the globe and generated $39.4 billion in revenue in 2022. Global Dynamics IT, one of its 10 business units, has more than 28,000.
Lambert said the company plans to begin hiring employees with U.S. top secret clearances. The company is focused on hiring people with knowledge of artificial intelligence and machine learning, he said, as the Air Force has been seeking those “in-demand skills” from its workforce.
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