Early Corporate History
The history of KCI Technologies can be traced to a small firm operating out of the basement of the co-founder’s Baltimore County home in 1955. By its second year, the company took up residence in a proper facility, only to change locations several times over the next decade in a succession of moves that paralleled its growth. In 1969, it was purchased, along with three other architectural and engineering firms, by industrial products conglomerate Walter Kidde & Company. The Kidde acquisitions merged into an engineering subsidiary that came to be known as Kidde Consultants Inc., or KCI. During the 1980s, KCI expanded throughout the Mid-Atlantic, opening new offices in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Employee Ownership
In August 1987, Hanson Trust PLC of Great Britain, a manufacturing company with diversified holdings worldwide, purchased Kidde, the parent company. Soon thereafter, KCI initiated an employee buyout from Hanson, which was completed in December 1988. KCI became Maryland’s largest employee-owned company. In 1991, the official name was changed to KCI Technologies Inc., and two years later, the corporate headquarters was moved to its present location in Hunt Valley, Md.
Continued Growth
With revenues of approximately $142 million in 2007, the Engineering News-Record has consistently placed KCI among the top consulting engineering firms in the country. Today, our roughly 1,000 employee owners operate out of 28 offices in 13 states—Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia—and the District of Columbia.
Technical Expertise
With a professional staff of engineers, planners, scientists, surveyors, and construction managers, we offer a broad range of engineering services, including civil, structural, transportation, environmental, hazardous waste, mechanical, electrical, telecommunications, and soils. But engineering is not all we do. We also provide cultural and environmental resource management services, land planning and landscape architecture, geology, hydrology, ecology, surveying, and construction management and inspection. All of our service lines are supported by a team of CADD operators, GIS specialists, database and Web programmers, and other computer-savvy professionals working on state-of-the-art equipment.
At KCI, we believe that our broad technical expertise, combined with our unique commitment as employee owners, has enabled us to emerge as industry leaders whose customers can count on excellent service time and again.
© KCI Holdings 1994-2006