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RICOH’s INFOPRINT HEADQUARTERS LEAVING COLORADO
InfoPrint Solutions headquarters leaving Boulder, Colorado
Company’s HQ to leave Gunbarrel campus for New Jersey location
Boulder will lose a company headquarters and an undisclosed number of jobs over the next few months, as InfoPrint Solutions Co. makes a move from IBM’s Gunbarrel campus to a new home in New Jersey.Japan-based Ricoh Co. Ltd., which owns the high-end printing solutions provider, announced Monday that it will realign its production print resources and form a new entity called Ricoh Production Print Solutions, of which InfoPrint will be a part. The new organization will be headquartered in West Caldwell, N.J.
Peter Lazaroff, InfoPrint’s vice president of communications, confirmed that layoffs at the company’s Boulder site are coming — but he wouldn’t say how many jobs will be lost.
InfoPrint, which ranked No.12 last year on the Camera’s list of Boulder and Broomfield counties’ largest employers, has a workforce of 725 people at its Boulder location. There are 2,800 company employees globally.
"It’s not imminent — it’s something that will be happening over the next several months," Lazaroff said Monday. "The workforce reduction is pretty much going to be coming from everywhere within the company."
He stressed that there aren’t plans to relocate the entire InfoPrint operation out of Boulder and that a sizable research and development team will continue to work at the IBM campus, where InfoPrint leases 400,000 square feet in four buildings from the giant information technology firm.
"When Ricoh purchased us from IBM, they purchased a lot of that intellectual capital as well — the people," Lazaroff said.
There are no immediate plans to jettison any of the space InfoPrint occupies in Gunbarrel as a result of the consolidation, Lazaroff added.
InfoPrint provides software and services for large companies with complex printing needs, like utility bills and bank statements.
In a press release, Ricoh said InfoPrint is being folded into the Ricoh Production Print Solutions group in order to "provide a more effective and efficient approach" to the competitive high-end printing sector.
"The new business model will deliver greater customer value by bringing together Ricoh resources to develop, market and support industry leading end-to-end solutions for production customers," the company said.
The impending relocation of InfoPrint’s headquarters marks a milestone in the history of IBM-Boulder’s Gunbarrel campus, which has been home to some sort of printing operation for the last 45 years. The company started out as IBM’s printer division, before Ricoh bought a controlling interest in InfoPrint in 2007 for $725 million.
It operated as a partnership between Ricoh and Big Blue until Ricoh assumed full ownership of InfoPrint last year. Mike Stratton, a spokesman with IBM-Boulder, said IBM’s relationship with InfoPrint is limited to one of landlord and tenant at this point.
Monday’s announcement follows a decision last month by Niwot-based footwear-maker Crocs to lay off 22 workers. In February, CraftWorks Restaurant and Brewery Inc. announced it would let go 30 to 35 workers from its corporate offices, which includes an undisclosed number of positions at subsidiary Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery’s Louisville headquarters.
Several attempts Monday to reach Liz Hanson, Boulder’s economic vitality coordinator, for comment were unsuccessful. But John Cody, president of the Longmont Area Economic Council, said job cuts so close to home are never desirable.
"We hate to see the loss of any primary jobs in the region," he said. "We certainly hope to replace them at some point in time."
Cody said preliminary indications for the first quarter of 2011 is that Longmont has experienced a net increase in its number of primary jobs, a factor that could serve to dull the pain of job losses at InfoPrint.
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