Novitex opens Windsor MegaCenter

BY ALEXANDER SOULE
Hearst Connecticut Media

On Monday, with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in attendance, Stamford-based Novitex Enterprise Solutions opened its new MegaCenter document-processing facility in Windsor near Bradley International Airport.

Formerly part of Stamford-based Pitney Bowes, Novitex is relocating a Windsor operation it inherited as part of its creation as an independent company, with the pre-existing facility around the corner from its new site.

The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development awarded Novitex a $5 million forgivable loan if it retains 335 jobs in Connecticut and creates 200 more within the next five years. As of mid-March, Novitex listed just five open jobs in Stamford, including one position to lead recruiting, of about 20 total in Connecticut.

Stamford-based Novitex Enterprise Solutions is relocating a document processing center within Windsor to 758 Rainbow Road. Photo by Alexander Soule

With government agencies and corporations outsourcing the printing and distribution of sensitive documents to Novitex, visitors were asked to surrender their mobile phones upon entering the new facility for security reasons.

“Some of the types of documents that have to be produced are very sensitive and need to be timed to the marketplace for substantial compliance and legal reasons,” Malloy said, before a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour of the main document production floor. “To know that Novitex is going to be called upon to do that and in even greater numbers ”“ and to do much of that work here in Connecticut ”“ is tremendous.”

Novitex has its headquarters at 300 First Stamford Place in Stamford, employing 155 people there of about 9,000 employees total. The company is controlled by Apollo Global Management, an investment firm based in New York that acquired Novitex from Pitney Bowes in 2014 for $400 million.

Novitex CEO John Visentin said the cross-Windsor move was prompted partly by the new building’s improved security characteristics, without going into details.

“Some clients said to me, ‘besides the cellphones, do you want my wallet?'” Visentin joked. “My response is yes.”

Visentin said the new facility is a key addition for Novitex as it looks to create its own identity and spur growth in the post-Pitney Bowes era.

Novitex straddles two related sectors: managed print services and managed content services. As defined by Gartner, a Stamford-based company that assesses technology products and services, managed print service providers take responsibility for meeting a customer’s office printing needs, including supplies and managing the printer “fleet,” in Gartner’s words. By contrast, managed content service vendors help companies streamline the archiving, retrieval and extraction of data from digital documents.

The managed print services sector Novitex occupies includes Hewlett-Packard, where Visentin worked prior to joining Novitex, and Norwalk-based Xerox. In its annual “Magic Quadrant” analysis of the sector, Gartner ranked Xerox tops, dropping Pitney Bowes from the ranking and stating Novitex does not meet its inclusion criteria, without saying the areas in which it was lacking.

Novitex joins a small army of Stamford companies in which Connecticut is betting taxpayer dollars in exchange for adding jobs here, with Pitney Bowes itself having gotten a big package to keep its headquarters in Stamford.

In some cases companies have delivered jobs beyond their initial commitments, notably Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide in Stamford, which took an initial incentive package to relocate its headquarters here in 2012 on the promise of adding more than 800 jobs. Today, Starwood employs more than 1,100 people in Stamford and expects to add 200 more within the next two years.

But the state has had a few prominent failures as well, including in Hartford, where golf website Back9Network abruptly shut down just a few years after receiving funding.

Malloy said the incentives are one reason for the state adding more than 23,000 jobs last year.

“We’re at about a 2 percent failure rate,” Malloy said. “Last time I checked, the Commerce Department was closer to 20 (percent). I’ll take my record over the (federal government’s) any time.”

Hearst Connecticut Media includes four daily newspapers: Connecticut Post, Greenwich Time, The Advocate (Stamford) and The News Times (Danbury). See stamfordadvocate.com for more from this reporter.