Keeping tabs on traveling CEOs

Tony Roman is getting to be a very popular guy these days among corporations and top executives. It's not that he's bringing them money. It's that he's helping keep them safe, or at least his software is.

Roman, founder and chief executive of Lynbrook-based Roman & Associates, developed a software product that began selling about five years ago that is designed to detect and keep track of the location of corporate executives who travel in such world hot spots as Afghanistan or Iraq. If the executive deviates from his or her planned route, the software notifies his or her superiors. If it is determined the executive has been kidnapped, the software leaves an electronic trail of where the executive has been taken.

"It's 21st-century intelligent- decision-making software," said Roman, a career security expert who once provided protection for the Manhattan-based Helmsley-Spear Corp.

Roman said he is unable, for security reasons, to further describe the system or even to say how many are in use. He will say, however, that the system is used by executives of Fortune 500 companies and that there has been a dramatic increase in use in the past few years.

Phil Alongi, who spent 31 years with NBC News and was lastly an executive producer who traveled widely to the world's hot spots before leaving in 2009, was equipped with the system for the last five years he was with the network. "I prefer playing it safe," said Alongi, who still travels to those same spots as a news consultant and still uses the system. "Yes, the bombings are an issue, but the biggest issue is the kidnappings."

Roman, a licensed commercial pilot and also a former human rights commissioner for the village of Rockville Centre, has built his company over the past 29 years. It now has about 110 employees, including lawyers, former Justice Department special agents, engineers and forensic accountants. The privately held company does not release revenue figures.