AOL cultivates future at Virginia office park

In cyberspace, America Online's goal is to be "anywhere, any time."

But in physical space, the world's largest Internet service provider sits on about 40 hectares in Loudoun County, on the fringe of the national capital region where pastures are giving way to office parks.

The AOL campus, with six modern buildings, sprawls next to an overgrown field where an aging silo stands sentinel. Across the street is a Wal-Mart store.

The bucolic setting may suggest that this campus is just another distant outpost of AOL Time Warner Inc, the powerful parent company based in New York.

But Dulles is the place where AOL Time Warner's future will be decided.

While the media conglomerate may produce glamorous magazines in Rockefeller Center, make movies in Los Angeles and package cable news in Atlanta, it looks to the Internet operations in Dulles for rich profits.

"As far as AOL being the growth engine of AOL Time Warner, it clearly is," said Mark Stavish, executive vice president of human resources. "The financial expectations on AOL are dramatic."

Last Wednesday, when AOL Time Warner announced its second-quarter financial results, America Online's importance was underscored again. For the corporation, quarterly revenues were up just 3 percent over last year. The music division's revenues were down 11 percent, and the publishing division's were off 1 percent.

But the AOL division's revenues jumped 13 percent to US$2.14 billion. AOL subscription growth set a record for the quarter, shooting up by 1.3 million to reach 30.1 million members, despite a US$1.95 price increase that pushed AOL's monthly subscription rate to US$23.90.

"The vast majority of growth for this company is going to come out of AOL," Stavish said.

The Dulles work force of 3,700 includes engineers, programmers, marketers, lawyers, content developers, network managers and human resources staff. Together, these employees are expected to provide the ideas that will attract new subscribers and keep old ones paying their monthly fees.

"The next evolution of AOL is going to be, how do we make sure you can access your AOL account from a cell phone, a Palm Pilot" or any other mobile device, Stavish said. The Dulles workers' mission is to make sure that "your information is available to you any time, anywhere in the world and on any platform."

Though it laid off 725 employees, including about 300 in Dulles, following this January's merger with Time Warner, America Online plans to resume its phenomenal employment growth before long.

Construction crews are just finishing a day-care center for 150 children, and have started moving earth for a new 18,580-square-meter office building. Plans call for construction of two more buildings of similar size. Each is intended to house an additional 700 employees.

The campus here 50km west of Washington already encloses 149,000 square meters of offices, but provides workers with little in the way of urban amenities such as trendy restaurants and coffee shops.

Still, AOL workers are mostly happy campers, routinely telling company surveys that they enjoy their jobs, Stavish said. Many have become millionaires from their AOL stock.

And while other Internet-related companies in the vicinity, such as PSINet Inc and Teligent Inc, have filed for bankruptcy protection recently, AOL has remained a thriving employer.