TURNING THE PAGE

PROVIDENCE — Tuesday was a day of change at 75 Fountain St.

In a cavernous space that had once been the Providence Journal press room for a half-century, and then newsroom for a quarter-century, one of Providence's newest digital technology companies welcomed visitors to its new home.

"Welcome to Infosys Providence," Lara Salamano, the lead for the company's Providence Design & Innovation Center, told gathered guests, including Gov. Gina M. Raimondo and Stefan Pryor, the state's commerce secretary, whose Commerce Corporation's marketing efforts helped lure Infosys to Providence. Before joining Infosys, Salamano was chief marketing officer for the R.I. Commerce Corporation.

And Amy Kempe, former spokeswoman for the attorney general's office, was on hand in her current role as the Community College of Rhode Island's spokeswoman, because Infosys and the college were announcing a new partnership to form a Digital Economy Aspirations Lab that will, according to Raimondo, "prepare the students at CCRI for careers in the digital economy."

Raimondo said that the company already has 100 people at its Providence Design & Innovation Center, with plans to expand to 500 by 2022. "We want you to feel here, in the state of Rhode Island, we're your partner ... as you continue to grow."

While the Digital Economy Aspirations Lab will help prepare CCRI students for "new collar" jobs of the future, it will also seek to develop such new technology jobs and run as a pilot program that Infosys leaders said they hope to take nationwide, where they have a goal to hire a total of 10,000 workers.

"A significant percentage of undergraduate students in the United States go through community college systems," Ravi Kumar, the company's president, said in prepared remarks. "Through our partnership with CCRI, we will ... tap into this underutilized yet extremely talented pool of individuals, bring them into the mainstream technology arena and train and develop them to be successful for the 'new collar' digital jobs."

Infosys joins Tufts Health Plan, GE Digital and Virgin Pulse as newcomers to the building, which The Providence Journal built in 1934, and which is now owned by Cornish Associates, whose founder and managing partner is Arnold “Buff” Chace. The newspaper offices occupy the second floor, home to the original composing room, where Linotype machines cast molten lead into type. The paper is printed at a separate printing plant that opened in 1987 a few blocks away.

— pparker@providencejournal.com

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