3 LI companies form IT cluster

Long Island government officials and business organizations have spent years trying mightily to put together "clusters" of technology companies that will be able to work together and feed off one another to build new industries in the region.

A small business and some tech guys have done it. In a small way, but they've done it.

Lou Fuoco, founder and managing partner of Hauppauge-based accounting and financial consulting firm Fuoco Group; the two founders of East Meadow-based XT Group; and the chairman of Melville-based LISTnet will all be under one roof come next month -- at a three-floor, 30,000-square-foot building on Parkway Drive South in Hauppauge.

Peter Goldsmith, LISTnet's chairman, is calling the arrangement "an information technology mall."

In 2008, Fuoco, whose accounting firm had always been in the Hauppauge area, bought the 30,000-square-foot building. "It was time to make an investment," Fuoco said. About 45 of his 85 employees work at the building. The rest are at offices in Florida and Manhattan.

In early January, Fuoco Group merged with XT Group, an information-technology company. They formed a new company, Fuoco Technology. (The Fuoco Group remains as an accounting firm.) Fuoco and XT founders Paul Trapani and Peter Xenakis decided it made sense to locate XT's eight employees in the Fuoco building.

LISTnet, a technology-boosting organization now in an ordinary Melville office building, wanted to be with the tech company, said Goldsmith. Goldsmith and a LISTnet employee will locate in Hauppauge at the beginning of March. Xenakis said he and his employees will be there at the end of this month.

Goldsmith said other tech companies have taken a look at the building and are interested in moving there. "We saw technology as another area of value, especially with the way the economy has been," said Fuoco. "We can provide clients with a host of services."

Xenakis said the merger of XT Group and Fuoco "was the perfect storm" for getting together in one building. Said Goldsmith: "Right now we're just in a building. As other tenants move in we can expand and create other companies."