ProLogic’s $1 million facility unveiled
Building high-tech systems to help the military and protect the country, ProLogic Inc. on Thursday officially unveiled its $1 million facility in Fayette County. The company, headquartered in Fairmont, W.Va., specializes in software development, tactical data links, complex systems integration and Internet technology management. It employs about 200 people at sites in Uniontown, West Virginia, Virginia, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida and Alabama. Some 31 of those workers are employed in Fayette County, most at its new site in the University Technology Park next to Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus on Route 119 north of Uniontown.
ProLogic has contracts for work for the U.S. Air Force, Army and a service agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. ProLogic will do about $25 to $26 million worth of business this year, Paul Maguire, ProLogic vice president of marketing, said.
“One of the reasons we came to Uniontown,’ Maguire said, “was because we can get kids from Penn State, Waynesburg, California, Carnegie Mellon and other area universities. We have a hard time finding people we need here (in the Fairmont area) but not in Uniontown. And we can offer them very good jobs.’
Maguire said about half of ProLogic’s Fayette work force is from this area.
“We are pleased to have a permanent place to call our home in Uniontown. Our proximity to the Penn State campus and to partners like Advanced Acoustic Concepts makes this an ideal place to grow our business,’ Jay Reddy, CEO and founder, said.
Reddy said that ProLogic has 26 full- and five part-time employees at its Uniontown operation with a monthly payroll of about $150,000. Total annual compensation for its workers, including salary and benefits, he added, is about $75,000.
“We have 10 years of successful operation and for a small business, that’s a big deal,’ Reddy said in comments at the opening ceremony.
“This is an employee-owned company and all the employees have stock options in it,’ he said.
“We are already looking at plans to expand this building,’ he said, adding the 7,000-square-foot property is almost full. The company is still leasing space in the Benatec building at the technology park and National City Bank building in downtown Uniontown.
Reddy and other ProLogic officials came to Uniontown in July 2003 to meet with representatives of Fay-Penn Economic Development Council. In December 2003, the company officially announced plans to build in the technology park. However, ProLogic has been operating here, Reddy said, for about 15 months in rented offices.
“This is an area that produced Gen. George Marshall and workers in the steel and coal industries who made the armor used during World War II,’ Reddy said, adding that for himself, a first generation immigrant from Banglore, India, the United States is “like no other country in the world,’ for someone starting a business.
But, he warned, “We may not be doing enough in science and mathematics to prepare our students for a new world economy. We will be competing with many other nations for the high-tech jobs. We cannot continue to innovate in a vacuum.’ With that, Reddy said ProLogic will sponsor from six to eight scholarships each year in math and science in local middle and high schools to encourage and foster interest in those fields.
The new building and its community outreach, Reddy said, are a “testament to our commitment to this area. We have planted deep-rooted seeds and we hope that new entrepreneurs will do the same.’
U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Johnstown), the special guest at the opening, was honored for his help in bringing ProLogic to the area. Murtha said he is “gratified and optimistic about how this is going. Many companies start with just five employees but then grow,’ Murtha said, adding there are three in the Johnstown area that combined have more than 1,600 workers.
“But this isn’t just about finding employees,’ Murtha said, adding, “We can bring somebody in but they have to have a customer or we can’t help them.’
Murtha explained that in order to get federal appropriations for companies, they must have customers in line for the work.
“There is brutal competition between all countries of the world that we have to look at and we have to be able to compete,’ Murtha said.
Awarding competitive contracts also saves money, he said.
“Small, high-tech companies like ProLogic are developing the innovative products needed to sustain a 21st century fighting force,’ Murtha said.
Murtha toured the facility and examined some of ProLogic’s products, one of which is the “Pocket J’ system.
According to ProLogic, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks “made clear the need for ground-based controllers to quickly and unambiguously communicate the location, direction of flight and speed of terrorist-controlled aircraft. Connectivity with ground-based radars is vital because the terrorists turn-off the radio identification and tracking signal broadcast by aircraft operating in U.S. airspace leaving conventional radar tracking of the terrorist-controlled aircraft as the only means for identifying and tracking the terrorist-controlled aircraft.
“The Pocket J tactical data link system will be located at NORAD and U.S. Air Force ground-based command and control sites and at Air Defense Centers (ADCs). The resulting tactical data link network will ensure positive, time-critical communication of intercept information between the ground-based air controllers and the pilots flying the interceptor aircraft.
The Pocket J development effort is managed and contracted to ProLogic of Uniontown by the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Command’s Tactical Data Link Systems Program Office at Hanscom AFB, MA.
Each Pocket J unit can sell for $1.1 million or more, and ProLogic wants to build and sell 40 of them, Maguire said.
In addition, ProLogic’s Uniontown operation also is home to several other national defense programs, including the development of key capabilities for the USAF surgeon general, and Force Protection and Enhanced Situational Awareness capabilities for battle commanders of the Army.