The Canton Group landed its first Maryland State Government contract with the Maryland Department of General Services in 2002. Since then, we've partnered with Maryland state and local government to modernize, automate, and secure the systems these agencies depend on every day, backed by our SOC 2 Type 2 certification for security and data handling practices. Headquartered in Baltimore since our founding in 1998, we've grown into a technology partner trusted by more than 35 Maryland state agencies, along with county governments, public universities, and other public institutions across the state.

A Partner Through Every Administration

Our first Maryland State Government contract, with the Maryland Department of General Services (DGS) in 2002, was more than a company milestone. Ethan Kazi, The Canton Group's CEO (our CTO at the time), worked directly on that project himself, and has gone on to serve on transition teams for multiple statewide changes in leadership since, spanning changes in governors, comptrollers, and other constitutional officers. That kind of continuity, staying a trusted technical partner through changing administrations, is part of what a 24-year relationship with Maryland government looks like.

The DGS engagement itself grew well beyond the original web application project, later including an AS400 systems audit and a server repair and migration plan, the kind of infrastructure work that doesn't make headlines but keeps a state agency running.

Supporting Maryland's Elections and Judiciary Systems

Some of our longest-running Maryland government work keeps the state's elections and courts running. Since 2009, The Canton Group has maintained the Maryland Voter Registration System (MDVOTERS), the centralized voter list used by all 24 local boards of elections and more than 300 election officials statewide, covering everything from registration and verification to ballot processing, polling place setup, and candidacy filing.

Our work with the Board of Elections has gone beyond MDVOTERS too. For several years, we also maintained the Agency Election Management System (AEMS), a centralized application integrated with MDVOTERS that handles core election operations: generating ballot layouts and tracking the thousands of distinct ballot styles required each election cycle, processing candidate filings and nomination certificates, and compiling results, including write-in votes, into the official canvass sheets used for election certification. We also held a separate cybersecurity contract with the agency.

That relationship became the foundation for a broader elections technology practice at The Canton Group, one that has since expanded to other states and counties, including Los Angeles County, California.

We've done similar work for the Maryland Judiciary, designing and building the Drupal-based website for the Maryland Court System that millions of Maryland residents rely on for court information and services.

Automating the Work Government Depends On

Nowhere is that long-term trust more visible than at the Maryland State Ethics Commission, where The Canton Group has been a partner since 2005.

In 2017, we built FReD, Maryland government's first Robotic Process Automation bot, to help the Commission review the thousands of financial disclosure statements it's required to audit every year. Before FReD, that review took Commission staff roughly 3,300 hours annually. After, it took about 40 hours, a 99% reduction in review time across roughly 20,000 annual submissions.

FReD didn't replace the Commission's staff. It gave them their time back, so they could spend it on the parts of the job that actually need a person: judgment calls, investigations, and the kind of oversight that keeps public trust intact.

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A Long-Standing Partnership with Maryland's School Systems and Education

Since 2006, The Canton Group has partnered with the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) across a growing set of systems. That began with a data warehouse project, which grew into our first prime contract with the Maryland Accountability & Reporting System (MARS), which MSDE uses to track and process financial claims for the state's school nutrition programs, and grew to include the MDK12 and Maryland Report Card websites, the public tools MSDE uses to report on student achievement and school performance statewide. More recently, we worked with MSDE's design team and leadership to migrate the Report Card site, moving years of historical content and data into the new system.

Our work with MSDE also reaches into early childhood education. We support and maintain the Child Care Administrative Tracking System (CCATS), the Division of Early Childhood's portal for the state's child care programs, handling ongoing upgrades, production deployments, and an AWS migration and stabilization effort. We're also contributing to the state's broader Child Care System Modernization Effort (CCSME), focused on quality assurance, data reliability, and improvements to eligibility verification speed and provider transparency across Maryland's child care system.

That relationship runs deep enough that when MSDE needed a fast, trusted partner in the early days of COVID-19, they turned to the same team already running MARS.

Showing Up When It Mattered Most

When the pandemic shut down schools in March 2020, it also shut down the meals many Maryland students depended on every day. We worked with the Maryland Accountability & Reporting System (MARS) team to help stand up a statewide meal site search tool, connecting families to open meal sites across Maryland during a period when consistent nutrition mattered more than almost anything else.

Through that effort, Maryland delivered more than 46 million meals to over 400,000 schoolchildren. Far from a pandemic-only fix, that same tool remains in active, everyday use as the Maryland Summer Meals Site Map, helping families find free meal sites for kids 18 and under each summer, no registration or ID required, with listings updated nightly.

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Modern Public Health Data for Baltimore City

Government modernization work doesn't always make headlines, but it adds up.

In 2018, we built an AWS-powered data lake for the Baltimore City Health Department, an agency that handled health data across 12 different programs and more than 30 disparate databases of varying ages and formats, previously scattered across BCHD's own programs and divisions. The migration combined services including Lambda, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Simple Storage Solution (S3), and Elastic Cloud servers to move, monitor, and secure the data throughout the process. That gave BCHD a low-cost, scalable, and secure alternative built to support both search and deeper analysis, not just storage.

The result let BCHD move from siloed records to integrated analysis, dashboards, and visualizations it didn't have before, with a lower total cost of ownership than the fragmented systems it replaced.

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A Long-term Digital Partner Behind Maryland’s Biggest Venues

For about a decade, The Canton Group has been the web partner behind the Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA), the agency that manages some of Maryland's most visible venues, including Oriole Park at Camden Yards, M&T Bank Stadium, and Pimlico Race Course. Since around 2016, we've provided MSA with website hosting, maintenance, and support, and in 2022 that relationship was competitively renewed for another three years. Along the way, the work has included accessibility upgrades and a full platform overhaul, plus a routine billing audit that caught a telecommunications error and put $84,000 back in MSA's pocket, the kind of close-attention-to-detail work that adds up over a long relationship.

That partnership extended to two of MSA's other properties as well. For many years, we helped maintain and update the website for the Maryland Sports Commission, MSA's division responsible for attracting, promoting, and retaining regional, national, and international sporting events across the state. We also built the original Team Maryland website, a county-by-county resource covering sporting information, events, and facility details for Maryland's 14-plus county sports partners, before it was eventually folded into a different platform.

One of Our Earliest Maryland Government Partnerships

Some of our most extensive Maryland government work is behind us now, but it shaped more than a decade of our transportation practice in the state. Working alongside the Maryland Transit Administration's own webmaster, we designed, built, and maintained the agency's public website and a separate web portal through several versions over the years, including redesigns that followed the state's branding updates whenever a new governor took office. We later rebuilt the site to incorporate a new MDOT branding initiative, and its most recent version added real-time bus and train tracking, a genuinely useful upgrade for riders as the underlying technology matured.

That work extended well beyond MTA's website. Under the broader Maryland Department of Transportation umbrella, we also designed, built, and supported sites for the Maryland Aviation Administration, the Maryland Port Administration and Cruise Maryland, which covered the cruise lines docking in Maryland's ports, along with the Charm City Circulator. For the Circulator, we even built an early, lightweight mobile app tool that pulled route data from its website so riders could check bus routes from their phones, well before true mobile apps were standard. We also worked with the Maryland Transportation Authority, another agency under the MDOT umbrella that oversees the state's toll facilities, on an Oracle-to-Microsoft SQL database conversion.

Powering Search Across Maryland's State Government

The Canton Group's relationship with the Maryland Department of Information Technology (DoIT) runs deep, in more ways than one. Our CEO was part of the team who recommended the creation of the department in its early days, long before it grew into the agency it is today.

DoIT has grown substantially since then. It now consolidates IT functions and policy across Maryland's executive branch, reporting directly to the Governor, and provides cybersecurity, infrastructure, and platform services to state agencies and local governments across Maryland, a scale that traces back to the department The Canton Group helped stand up.

The Canton Group went on to support DoIT and its web portals for many years, including deploying Maryland's first statewide consolidated search engine, built on Google's Search Appliance platform, a technology that powered enterprise search across the web for nearly two decades before Google discontinued it in 2019.

Certified to Serve Maryland

Beyond individual contracts, The Canton Group holds a set of Maryland-specific and company-wide designations. One of them, CATS+, has a personal history: our CEO was involved in recommending the creation of the original CATS contract, long before The Canton Group became a certified holder of what it eventually became.

• Maryland Consulting and Technical Services (CATS+) Master Contract Holder
• Maryland Small Business Reserve (SBR) Certified
• Maryland Department of Transportation MBE
• Minority-owned Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB)
• Family-Owned Small Business
• SOC 2 Type 2 Certified Business

Nearly Three Decades of Maryland Government Partners

Across nearly three decades, we've had the privilege of working with a long list of Maryland state agencies, county governments, and public institutions. Here's a look at some of them.

Continuing the Work

For more than two decades, The Canton Group has partnered with Maryland state and local government to modernize, automate, and secure the systems residents and agencies depend on every day. Curious how that track record could work for your organization?

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