Touchton Named Distinguished Alumni Award Winner

JACKSONVILLE--­ Bob Touchton, the vice president of the Advanced Technologies division of Strategic Technologies, Inc., has been named UNF's Distinguished Alumni Award winner.

Touchton was recognized for his contributions to the University including serving as a member and former chair of the advisory council for the College of Computing Sciences and Engineering, helping out at the annual high school robotics competition on campus and serving making scholarships available to students.

"I'm deeply honored and feel truly blessed to be chosen for this award. It has always been important to me that I give something back to the community," he said.

Touchton has been busy as well in his professional life. Through mergers and acquisitions, a Jacksonville company he helped start in 1984 has been transformed into one of the major technology firms on the East Coast.

Touchton graduated from Lee High School in Jacksonville. He pursued his interests in science at the University of Florida where he received his bachelor¹s degree in nuclear engineering followed by two master¹s degrees, in nuclear science and engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University, and in computer science at UNF in 1995.

He then worked as an engineer for Westinghouse Electric Corp. in Pittsburgh, and worked his way up to serve as a senior engineer at the company¹s offshore power systems division in Jacksonville.

In 1984, Touchton and several others ventured out on their own, starting PathTech Software Solutions Inc. which specialized in custom software development, electronic commerce, work- flow automation and network design.

In Feb. of 2000, PathTech was acquired by Strategic Technologies, Inc., an information technologies company about 10 times the size of Path Tech based in Cary, N.C. In October of last year, Strategic Technologies acquired The Allied Group, a similar company serving the Northeast based in Hartford, Conn. In connection with that acquisition it was decided to blend the three companies into the "new" Strategic Technologies. Touchton monitors new software technologies and works closely with two of the company¹s major corporate partners IBM and Microsoft.

The company remains based in Cary but has major offices in Hartford, Reston, Va. and Jacksonville as well as a dozen field offices up and down the East Coast and as far west as Nashville. The firm employees more than 300 workers and serves 800 clients generating combined revenue of $180 million in fiscal year 2000.