To WIT, Wang is no accident

The Women in Technology professional networking group clearly disagrees.

The group recently honored Wang with its 2007 Entrepreneur Award at its eighth annual Women in Technology Leadership Awards program.

‘‘It is not by accident Ms. Wang has built Binary upon some of the same core values and tenants as WIT’s values to Connect, Lead, Succeed,” the nonprofit group announced. The Alexandria, Va., organization, with 1,000 members, says it offers women ‘‘at all levels of the technology industry a wide range of professional development and networking opportunities.”

In accepting the award, Wang said, ‘‘To be among a record number of nominees of outstanding, notable women leaders, I am extremely honored and pleased to be the recipient of the WIT Entrepreneur award. This is a great honor for Binary and me, because of what WIT stands for. I am proud to be a Binarian.”

The Binary Group is a Small Business Administration 8(a) defense contractor that provides strategic advice on information technology to federal customers including the Army, Navy and Air Force, Secretary of Defense, Army Corps of Engineers and Defense Information Systems Agency.

Last year the company reached revenues of about $20 million, an increase from $13.2 million in 2005.

‘‘We are thrilled to recognize Rose for her stellar contributions to the technology community at large and to Binary specifically,” Marguerete Luter, president of WIT, said in the announcement.

Wang was born in Shanghai and grew up in Beijing, where she earned a computer sciences degree. Then she earned a master’s in computer sciences at the University of Houston.

Although widely recognized for her success, Wang is frank about her ups and downs in business since immigrating to Texas. Her career has been framed in part by the dotcom bust earlier this decade and the Sept. 11, 2001, jetliner attacks.

‘‘I have transformed enough to know that we have to always keep our eyes open,” Wang said.

She began her career with the now-defunct software company Lighthouse Design in Houston, the same city where she met her husband, Ed Robinson, an information technology researcher at IBM. When Lighthouse was purchased by Sun Microsystems Inc., she decided she did not want to work for a huge company again, but instead concentrate on her independent consulting business, which she called Binary Consulting. One of her clients, telecommunications company MCI, brought her to the Washington, D.C., area, she said.

But Wang longed to ‘‘get back into a startup business,” and joined the now-defunct In-line Software in Northern Virginia. Then Wang left to start her own dotcom — at the wrong time, she said — in April 2000. By midyear that bubble was starting to burst. Still worse, she said, a partner stole Wang’s seed money.

‘‘I did a soul search and decided, ‘I don’t want to depend on my own capital’ and wrote a 10-page business plan and presented it to my husband for his opinion.”

The plan was to develop a ‘‘rent-a-CTO” — chief technology officer — service. The pair began looking for ‘‘high-powered technical people who could talk business,” she said. Robinson, a part-owner since Wang founded Binary in 1996, has been its CTO since August 2000.

In 2001, as the telecommunications sector was slumping, Wang’s company managed to stay afloat through an introduction to Dyncorp of Falls Church, Va., she said.

The night of that Sept. 11, Wang, realizing that war was imminent, began to learn about federal agencies. ‘‘I thought we have to change our focus and find out what it takes to be a government contractor.”

Again, DynCorp ‘‘took us in and they helped my small team learn what it means to be an 8(a) contractor, what it means to be teaming, pulling resources together for an opportunity” for a government bid, she said. Her first deal under that business model was as a subcontractor to DynCorp to provide software for the software for the Army’s transportation management system.

Wang said Binary’s latest change was to abandon building software last year.

‘‘We now help secure integrators to build software,” she said. ‘‘We do policy strategy, planning and procurement oversight but not the software.”