A Bend-based company has obtained and fulfilled about 150 federal government contracts worth millions of dollars for information technology and engineering work around the world.

And yet, the company, n-Link, has little name recognition around Central Oregon. It has quietly operated, expanded and won contract bids in Bend, among other offices, since 2008.

Bill Moseley, CEO of the Bend firm GL Solutions, which produces regulatory software for state government agencies, said he had never heard of n-Link. “As weird as that sounds,” he said. The name of a company that conducts similar business in the same city did not ring a bell to him.

David Blair, a Central Oregon field representative for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., stumbled across the company just 2 1/2 weeks ago. He learned that the Bend office was a few blocks away — in the Franklin Crossing building downtown — and promptly met with n-Link’s head and Scott Larson, venture catalyst manager at Economic Development for Central Oregon. Larson said his organization had not previously been familiar with n-Link either.

Founded in 1995 with its first office in Bremerton, Wash., n-Link works in many realms of technology, and describing it all in general terms is difficult.

“‘What do you guys do again?’ I get that all the time,” said the company’s head, Sandra Green. “It’s hard to understand what we do.”

Nevertheless, Green was willing to try to summarize.

“Most of our work is high-end software development — to develop the brains to perform a mission, you know, of a particular system,” she said. For example, she continued, “Like doing the software to manage the flow of the water (through) the dams to generate electricity … ”

Green, n-Link’s founder, CEO and chairwoman of the board of directors, was talking about a project n-Link had done with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Portland. To meet the agency’s needs, n-Link came up with and implemented “hydroelectric powerhouse equipment control applications” for the Columbia and Snake rivers, according to a description of the work on the company’s website.

The firm made headlines outside Bend earlier this year, after a five-year contract to provide IT help in classrooms at U.S. Army bases worldwide was given the thumbs-up to continue into its second year. Soldiers and their family members can participate in distance learning in the classrooms through video conference, and n-Link employees will ensure the software and hardware in use are up to date and problem-free. In exchange for the help, n-Link expects to receive about $33.5 million over time.

Green said a government agency usually gives approval for a contract to continue into the second year, unless the contractor is not meeting expectations. So the contract’s move into a second year, or first option year, is a good sign, although not atypical for n-Link.

Assignments

Currently, the company is seeking to obtain a $1 billion contract to protect data via cloud computing for the U.S. Department of Energy, Green said. For that project, Green said the winning bidder would have to provide a facility. “I’m actually toying with the idea of offering (to build) a cloud-computing data center out of Bend,” she said.

A list of contracts n-Link has fulfilled runs long.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave n-Link an assignment that necessitated complex logistics: providing USDA staffers in all offices in the country with new identification cards. The USDA needed to comply with HSPD-12, a 2004 directive from former President George W. Bush for federal government agencies on new standards for federal ID cards, and n-Link won the contract for work.

Company employees brought mobile registrar stations to USDA offices in almost every state and scanned department workers’ fingerprints, which would be worked into the new identification system, Green said. And, she said, n-Link employees mentored USDA software developers in creating the most efficient possible system.

Other government clients that have chosen n-Link for contract work include the BPA, GSA, FEMA, FAA and FOH. That’s a lot acronyms for Green to remember. (They stand for the Bonneville Power Administration, General Services Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Occupational Health.) But it just comes with the territory of working with the government, and Green has long since gotten used to it, she said.

Background

Once Larson realized how successful n-Link is, he said, he wanted to enlist Green in the Stable of Experts, a collection of experienced business minds with Central Oregon ties who volunteer to guide startup companies and entrepreneurs here. The Stable of Experts resides under the umbrella of EDCO’s Venture Catalyst program, Larson said.

Green, he said, is a “very intelligent, very well connected individual with an impressive background.”

Green, 53, grew up in Laconia, N.H. She said she earned her master’s degree in information and communications systems under the electrical engineering department from the University of Lowell, which has since become part of what is now called University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Much of the work in her career has related to government business, she said.

Before establishing n-Link, Green said she worked in Boston at the nonprofit Mitre Corp., where she designed networks for scores of computers at companies or government agencies.

She was later recruited by the Planning Research Corp. in McLean, Va. — which the Northrop Grumman Corp. eventually acquired — to transfer Pentagon networks from centralized, mainframe computing to distributed, local-area computing.

After leaving PRC, she said she did similar work as vice president for business development at a small company called I-Net. She said she opened a new office for the company in Bremerton, so it could do more business on the West Coast.

In 1994, she left I-Net, and n-Link was born the next year.

The company has expanded, adding executives, offices and clients along the way. It has also begun to contract out certain elements of work it is assigned. For example, along with n-Link, three subcontractors on the Army classroom project have kept staff on-site at military bases in the U.S.

All the while, the company has maintained a low public profile.

“It’s because we’re (working with) government, you know?” Green said. “As a government contractor, we tend to not … promote ourselves, because the government doesn’t usually like you to promote yourself.”

A company such as hers is supposed to come across, she said, as “a humble civil servant. You’re serving the taxpayers.”

Moseley, with GL Solutions, agreed.

“Mainly, we take a similar tack,” Moseley said. ”… It’s not important that we’re known, because we don’t provide direct services to the community.”

The local contractors simply continue doing their business, not concerning themselves conveying a message or image in the public sphere.

Last year, Green began a “new adventure” of turning n-Link into an employee-owned company, through an employee stock-ownership plan, or ESOP. Instituting the ownership change benefits her and the other 150 employees — about seven of whom work in the Bend office — as they receive pension money that ordinarily would go toward federal taxes.

At the same time, in the past year or so, Green said, she has been trying to transition out of multinational work, such as what she does at n-Link, and become more grounded in the local community — in Bend, to be specific. Toward that end, she opened The Phoenix restaurant in a new space in east Bend in January 2010, after its original location in the Old Mill District had closed under different ownership in 2009.

And Green said she wants to start more small businesses in the city.

“So I’ve got to learn how to promote … our restaurant and any business I do that’s out of the government, because it’s just not in our nature — my nature, my background,” she said. “So we’ll get there.”