Savvy Savi Thrives Within Lockheed

Washington, D.C. - Savi Technology, an 18-year-old Mountain View, Calif., developer of systems to track cargo and other assets using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, has had so many corporate parents that you almost need one of its chips to track it.

A year ago, Lockheed Martin (nyse: LMT - news - people ) bought the then-private Savi for a reported $400 million. And as Savi co-founder Vikram Verma, who now runs the Savi Group within Lockheed, tells it, the unit seems to have finally found a good home.

At the time of the June 2006 acquisition, Savi had 300 employees and $80 million in revenues. In contrast, Lockheed, a government contracting behemoth headquartered in Bethesda, Md., has 140,000 employees and $39.6 billion in sales.

That raised the possibility that Savi might get lost within Lockheed, as it had in other big corporations. But Savi has brought Lockheed veterans into its operation to both boost its government contracting expertise (its first big defense win was a contract worth $70 million in 1994) and, frankly, to raise its stature within the Lockheed organization, Verma says.

It seems to have worked. At a recent Sanford Bernstein conference, Lockheed Chief Robert Stevens singled out Savi and its business as one of Lockheed's most promising areas of opportunity for the next five years.

Full story at Forbes.com

Home Builders Hit The Hill

Washington, D.C. - On Wednesday, 1,300 home builders will call on Capitol Hill as part of a legislative conference organized by their trade group, the National Association of Home Builders. They'll do so against a grim industry backdrop.

"For the first summer in many summers, we're not helping to keep unemployment numbers down," says Jerry M. Howard, 51, the NAHB's chief executive. "For the first time in six years, we are a drag on the economy rather than a plus."

Publicly held home-building companies have weighed on the stock market too. Consider the table below, which lists the 10 biggest U.S. home builders by latest-12-month revenues. On average, the group shares have dropped 12% year-to-date, versus a 9% gain for the S&P 500.

Fittingly, Howard is sending his troops out to congressional offices with a simple, overarching message: Don't kick us when we're down.

"Our strategy is to remind policymakers of our importance in economic and societal terms," he says, "and to convince them to take no action that would exacerbate this downturn in the housing industry."

One area of potential exacerbation: immigration. The NAHB has come out strongly against the proposed immigration overhaul now being considered by the U.S. Senate, particularly its portions cracking down on employers that hire illegal workers, directly or through subcontractors.

Full story at Forbes.com