Apogen opens Baton Rouge office

Officials from Apogen Technologies have opened a corporate office in Baton Rouge, La., to accommodate some employees after Hurricane Katrina made the company’s main New Orleans office uninhabitable.

“Everybody’s still pretty scattered right now," said Piper Conrad, a company spokeswoman. All of the company's 172 Gulf Coast employees are accounted for, she said.

A majority of the workers support projects for the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare (Spawar) Systems Center, including the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System, Area Security Operations Command Control and other information technology support and development services. Company officials are working with Navy officials to get projects up and running as soon as possible.

Conrad said the New Orleans office is co-located with the Navy’s Spawar office on the University of New Orleans’ campus on Lake Pontchartrain. She said the office suffered some water damage, but she didn’t believe any servers or records were affected.

About a week ago, company officials secured the Baton Rouge office, which can accommodate about 35 employees. Conrad said they have now found another office facility in the city where 10 more employees could work.

“In just a week’s time, we were able to secure two functional office spaces in Baton Rouge, and thanks to…Dave Mize and his Baton Rouge team, we have been able to create an operations center to facilitate the reconstitution and growth of our Gulf Coast business,” said Todd Stottlemyer, Apogen’s chief executive officer, in a prepared statement. Mize is senior vice president for emerging solutions at the company.

Other employees are working in facilities in Texas, New Mexico and Florida, and in the company’s McLean, Va., offices. Others are being allowed to work from home if they can, she said. Displaced employees, she said, are staying with friends, family and others.

But company officials said they are looking to re-establish the New Orleans office.

“We are committed to continue doing business in the state of Louisiana,” said Dan Oliver, Apogen’s sector president for national security, in a prepared statement. “As people begin to return to their homes in the coming weeks, we want to establish our temporary facilities in locations that are as convenient as possible for our employees.”

Apogen was founded in January 2004 through the merger of ITS Services of Springfield, Va., and New Orleans-based Science and Engineering Associates. It will become a wholly owned subsidiary of British defense contractor QinetiQ, which is buying the company for $300 million in cash.