Dick Clark unknowingly welcomed Sid Fuchs with his annual countdown as well. On New Year's Day, Sid officially took over as CEO of ATS Corporation (NYSE Amex: ATSC), replacing contracting veteran Ed Bersoff, who will remain chairman of the 32-year-old publicly traded company's board.

We met Sid at the Tower Club where he is the chairman of the board of governors. He's writing a book about strategic relationships and networking but finds time to ride his Harley, attend New Orleans Saints and LSU football games (he played trumpet and tuba in the LSU marching band and still plays guitar in a few local bands), and travel with his family. After graduating from LSU with an MS in mechanical engineering, he started his career with the CIA, analyzing fun things like Soviet nuclear weapons systems during the tail end of the Cold War. After eight years with the agency, he joined industry, via names like Oracle, Digital Equipment Corporation, Rational Software, and Northrop. He and his wife, Susan, live in Northern Virginia with their three teenage sons.

It seems we can’t go a few days without running into a geospatial data analysis company around here, so how can one differentiate itself in a growing field? ObjectFX president Steve Panzer, whose Minnesota-based company has offices in Columbia, does it by making sure his technology—namely a spatial rules engine—plays well with the other solutions in the space to make it a standard. “We’re great at taking large amounts of data and turning it into usable information,” says Steve, who launched the 16-year-old company’s federal division (and we’re talking from the ground up) 14 years ago before taking on his current position. The value of ObjectFX’s technology was reinforced recently when Steve and CTO David Hemphill were awarded the Geospatial Intelligence Achievement Award for Industry by the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (that's the pearl in a clamshell Steve is holding).

A native New Yorker and avid skier, Steve admits he hates the snow on his driveway but loves it in the mountains. He’s been known to go heli-skiing and says he can usually take on the toughest runs on a mountain after a few days of acclimating himself to the slopes. He’s also a member of the Columbia Ski Club that beyond planning ski trips likes to help out in the community, doing things like maintaining local roadways and greeting local returning soldiers.