|
An executive very well known to the heating, ventilation and air conditioning industries has been hired as president and chief executive officer of WaterFurnace Renewable Energy.
WaterFurnace employs 225 people in Fort Wayne making geothermal heating and cooling equipment. Tom Huntington will fill an opening at the top created by the retirement of Bruce Ritchey, who held the position 10 years.
“I am very happy that the board of directors has selected Tom Huntington as my successor. I have known Tom for 14 years and can think of no one more qualified or better suited for the job,” Ritchey said in a statement.
“I am excited as a shareholder to see what he can do for the business. I am also very happy for our employees and customers, because I know they will find Tom Huntington to be a terrific person to work for and to work with.”
Huntington was vice president and general manager of Unitary Products at Johnson Controls. He was president of York International’s Unitary Products Group when the company was acquired by Johnson Controls in 2005. The group made heat pumps, air conditioners and gas and oil furnaces.
As past chairman of the Gas Appliance Manufacturer’s Association, Huntington helped merge it with the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute to create the Air Conditioning, Heating, Refrigeration Institute.
He serves on the AHRI Planning Board and on the board of North American Technician Excellence, the training, testing and certification organization for the industry’s service technicians.
Navy awards $54 million to area defense contractors
The Navy announced last month contracts exceeding $54 million would go to the Fort Wayne operations of ITT Corp. and the Columbia City operations of Ultra Electronics-USSI.
The Fort Wayne-based Communications Systems Division of ITT designs and develops software-defined radios capable of communicating by means of various waveforms, including the JTRS Soldier Radio Waveform. ITT also specializes in microelectronics technology that reduces the size, weight and power of software-defined radios.
The division has a local plant that makes Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System units, which provide single-band VHF voice communications that rapidly jump from channel to channel to thwart enemy attempts at jamming or eavesdropping.
The Navy awarded ITT a $22.9 million, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract for SINCGARS waveform software support, saying the work would be done in Fort Wayne and completed in 2010.
Ultra Electronics operates a Columbia City plant for the production of underwater surveillance equipment known as sonobuoys, which are used to monitor traffic at sea, particularly submarine activity.
It was awarded a $31.3 million contract to provide the Navy Antisubmarine Forces group 7,320 sonobuoys and 20 “test, analyze and fix” units. About 35 percent of the work will be done in Columbia City and the rest will take place at an Ultra Electronics plant in DeLeon Springs, Fla.
CIO 100 award to honor project leadership at IU
CIO magazine said leadership in new software development models for higher education has earned Indiana University a spot among the country’s 100 most important organizations contributing to information technology innovation.
The IU Office of the Vice President for Information Technology has been told it will receive one of this year’s CIO 100 awards in honor of its leadership in developing open-source software with dozens of universities, colleges and commercial partners.
“In 2003, IU set a strategy to begin building some of its essential systems by pooling resources with other institutions,” said Brad Wheeler, information technology vice president and chief information officer at IU, in a statement.
“We saw that the Internet could reduce coordination costs of working together. The sharing of open-source application software could deliver essential features while reducing year-to-year costs, and avoid the future risks of large licensing fees and escalating maintenance costs.”
IU has co-founded some of biggest software and service projects of higher education, including the Sakai Project for learning and teaching software, Kuali for financial and other large administrative systems and HathiTrust for scanned, digital versions of published works as part of the Google Book Project.
The software is available to anyone without charge and Sakai is used around the world. The projects were launched with $9 million in funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and have attracted more than $60 million in pooled investment from 50 institutions and 22 commercial firms.
“We are developing 21st-century skills for the network era as we leverage IU investments with the investments of other institutions,” Wheeler said in the statement.
“It is a new way of thinking and working to rapidly innovate services for research and education with new efficiencies.”
If you have items for the banking and finance column, please contact Doug LeDuc by e-mail at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
, by phone at (260) 426-2640, ext. 309, or by mail at Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly, 826 Ewing St., Fort Wayne, IN 46802.
|
