Hartford Business Journal

12 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | March 14, 2022 ON THE RECORD | Q&A and data management and security using automation. Q. Who are your competitors? How do you differentiate from them? A. Our competitors are the largest outsourcing firms in the world. That would include Wipro, Accenture, Tata, Cognizant, Deloitte. They are asked, as we are, to help customers achieve business goals using technology. Our approach as a roughly 2,000-person firm, is obviously different from the approach of a 250,000-person firm. We focus on automation and our domestic workforce. Q. Why were you attracted to Hartford back in 2019 when you first entered the market? A. When Express Scripts was acquired by Cigna and became Evernorth we became a partner of Cigna's and came to understand the opportunity to do work in Hartford and help the city with its renaissance and make Hartford a technology hub, similar to what we had done in Detroit, which had fallen on incredibly hard times. GalaxE partnered with firms in Detroit and had an impact there in terms of developing a workforce that made technology a viable occupation in a reemerging American city. We saw exactly the same opportunity in Hartford. We saw an untapped market. We saw a city that wants to turn itself around. We have customers in the city that want to find a mechanism to help Hartford rebound and make technology a cornerstone. When we saw that opportunity combined with the educational institutions, workforce development programs in place or emerging, public-private partnerships with government ready and able to offer assistance, we made the decision to come to Hartford and build out a workforce that includes experienced people as well as doing workforce development in underserved communities. Q. How did the pandemic impact your Hartford expansion? A. Hartford, in my view, is not suffering more than anyplace else as a result of the pandemic. It has slowed down return to offices, but it has not slowed down the amount of work that needs to be done. Frankly, what has enabled Americans to work from home is technology, so the investment by large corporations in technology has not slowed. As a matter of fact, the emphasis on digitization is stronger than it was pre-COVID, so the opportunities for business and employment have risen. Q. Are GalaxE's employees back in the Hartford office? A. We are paralleling our customers, but our downtown Hartford offices are open. We have the entire 15th floor in City Place I. It's a beautiful office with incredible views of Hartford. We are still mostly a remote workforce right now but we have protocols in place and a lot of our work has to be done on-site, so the office is manned every single day. It will expand in terms of the number of individuals returning to work in the months and weeks ahead, presuming these variants remain manageable and people are taking reasonable precautions with their health. Q. Did the pandemic slow down your hiring in Hartford? Why are you adding these 180 jobs now? A. A little bit. What's going on now, though, is we've gotten really aggressive bidding for work. For example, the new 180 jobs we just announced were related to one customer that I can't name. That customer had a piece of work they assumed would need to be executed half in the Philippines and half in India. GalaxE.Solutions bid the work half in Hartford and half in India and that was an innovative approach. That validated the theory and premise of us being here, that we can execute with jobs going into emerging cities instead of foreign countries and do so even further with an emphasis on workforce development in underserved areas. Q. What kinds of jobs will be added in Hartford? A. The nature of the jobs is that inside corporations, you have multiple, very sophisticated applications running all the time and those applications require a lot of oversight and care. So one of the major functions of this group is to monitor the plethora of applications AT A GLANCE Company: GalaxE.Solutions Industry: IT U.S. HQ: Somerset, New Jersey CT HQ: Hartford Company Website: https://galaxe.com/ Phone Number: 732-868-0400 Business Banking by Community Bankers Coming Soon to Unionville James Murdick, SVP Chief Loan Offi cer Trish Tomlinson, VP Senior Commercial Loan Offi cer Antonella Calabrese, AVP Branch Manager, Farmington & Unionville Sherrie Dubois, Offi cer Cash Management Specialist Member FDIC | Equal Housing Lender ThomastonSB.com | 855.344.1874

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