ITT Corp. makes a wide array of products that include night-vision goggles, water pumps, brake pads and electronic components for the Motorola Razr cellphone.
The company, with headquarters in White Plains, N.Y., also happens to be one of the largest defense contractors in Colorado.
ITT received $867 million worth of defense contracts from fiscal year 2001 to 2005 for work primarily done in Colorado, according to an analysis of Defense Department data by The Denver Post.
That ranks it ahead of better-known defense contractors in Colorado such as Northrop Grumman Corp. and Ball Corp., though far behind Lockheed Martin Corp., which had $4.3 billion worth of defense contracts in Colorado in that time.
“When you think of a defense company, the bigger names tend to come to mind,” said Steve Gaffney, president of ITT’s defense business. “But we kind of pride ourselves on being the go-to partner of even those big” prime contracts.
The company’s systems division, based in Colorado Springs, is the largest component of its defense business.
It has about 600 workers locally and 7,000 worldwide and provides technical support and engineering services for the military. It raked in more than $1 billion in revenue in 2005.
Still, the company is generally not well-known as a defense firm.
That’s because the company’s other operations overshadow its work for the Pentagon, said Paul Nisbet, a defense analyst with JSA Research in Newport, R.I.
Nisbet – who tracks the likes of Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – said he doesn’t cover ITT because much of its value is dependent on non-defense-related work, such as manufacturing automotive components.
Indeed, ITT has always been a multifaceted company.
According to company spokesman Tom Glover, ITT was founded in 1921 as a phone company.
Its business later expanded to include everything from hotels to casinos to financial services.
“It’s a long, illustrious past,” Glover said.
In 1995, the company split into three parts.
One segment included casinos and hotels, with brand names like the Sheraton, and eventually merged with Starwood Hotels and Resorts. The second segment became The Hartford Financial Services Group, based in Hartford, Conn.
The third was ITT Corp., which until Saturday was known as ITT Industries.
ITT employs more than 40,000 people worldwide and has annual revenues of roughly $7.6 billion.
It has four main business units – Defense Electronics & Services, Fluid Technology, Motion & Flow Control and Electronic Components.
The Defense Electronics & Services business unit, which includes the Colorado Springs- based systems division, posted revenue of $3.2 billion in 2005, up from $2.4 billion in 2004.
The unit also includes an imaging software subsidiary based in Boulder that the company acquired from Eastman Kodak for $725 million in 2004. The software subsidiary employs about 100 in Boulder.
The systems division, which has been based in Colorado Springs for more than 30 years, is the fastest growing segment within the defense unit, Glover said. Over the past five years, the division’s revenue grew from $400 million to more than $1 billion.
In 2002, the division landed a contract worth up to $900 million over 18 years to update the military’s satellite tracking and missile warning sensors.
The division also provides services to NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s joint Deep Space Network, which is a network of antennas that picks up signals in outer space.
“We’ve just been a small company, which we were when we started in Colorado, that has grown,” said Pete McKinney, president of the systems division. “As we’ve grown, we took a significant presence in the marketplace and we are now starting to be noticed.”
But not everything has gone smoothly for the division. Last September, the company lost a contract to provide maintenance and logistical support to the Fort Carson Army Base. As a result, the company’s workforce shrank by 400 workers. It had worked on the contract, renewed annually, for the previous five years.
Rocky Scott, who served as president of the Greater Colorado Springs Economic Development Corp. for 16 years until last year, remembers ITT as “just one of those companies that was just there and did their work.”
Staff writer Andy Vuong can be reached at 303-820-1209 or avuong@denverpost.com.
Leading the pack
The top five Department of Defense contractors in terms of contract dollars received from fiscal year 2001 to 2005 for work conducted primarily in Colorado:
1. Lockheed Martin Corp.,
$4.3 billion
2. ITT Corp., $867 million
3. Northrop Grumman Corp., $799 million
4. Ball Corp., $437 million
5. Honeywell International Inc., $309 million
Source: U.S. Department of Defense
