US: Air Force job to send 100 Sytex staffers to Asia

by Harold Brubaker, Philadelphia Inquirer
January 31st, 2003

 A Doylestown information technology company signed a five-year, $98 million contract yesterday to provide communications support services to the Air Force in southwestern Asia.

 

Sytex Inc. initially expects to have 100 employees in six countries in the region, which stretches from Kazakhstan to Sudan and Kenya in Africa. "If we were to go to war, those numbers could increase significantly," the company's president and chief executive officer, Syd Martin, said.

 

Sytex will function as a full-service telecommunications firm for the Air Force in that territory, Jim Soos, its vice president of marketing, said.

 

"These guys are literally setting up new bases in the middle of the desert," he said. Sytex's responsibility could involve anything from setting up tactical satellite systems - which serve as a link to the outside world - to installing cable for television service.

 

Sytex Inc. is part of Sytex Group Inc., a privately held Doylestown company founded in 1988. It employs 1,700 and had sales of nearly $200 million last year. For the last three years, Sytex has been among the 100 largest providers of information technology services to the federal government.

 

The contract signed yesterday - worth $18.7 million in the first year, with options stretching it out to five years - is one of Sytex's largest ever Martin said Sytex received its largest contract earlier this month. That $150 million contract calls for the company to relocate an Army command from the suburbs of Virginia - where it is considered too susceptible to terrorist attack - to a secure military site.

 

Besides the armed services, Sytex supports other agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Six of the company's contracts are with agencies that have become part of the Department of Homeland Security.

 

Sytex Group's other companies are INS Inc. in Ivyland, Bucks County, and MacAulay-Brown Inc. in Dayton, Ohio. Altogether, the companies employ roughly 100 in Southeastern Pennsylvania and 120 in central New Jersey at Lakehurst Naval Air Station and Fort Monmouth.





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