New Jersey’s business community had plenty to talk about today, from a trio of family-business leaders earning national recognition in the office technology world to a Bridgewater security company elevating one of its own into the C-suite, alongside a fresh national honor for a Woodbridge-based staffing entrepreneur and a pointed statement from the state’s largest business advocacy group reacting to New Jersey’s latest slip in a closely watched national competitiveness ranking.
The Cannata Report Names Its 2026 Women Influencers
The Cannata Report, the leading trade publication covering the office technology and document imaging industry, has unveiled its 2026 Women Influencers, honoring Janene Aul, Jocelyn Gorman, and Lauren Hanna in the publication’s signature annual issue celebrating leadership within the office technology dealer channel. What ties this particular class of honorees together is a shared story of second-generation leadership, with all three women now steering family businesses originally built by their fathers, Keith Allison of Systel Business Equipment in North Carolina, Phil Houser of DSI in New Mexico, and Paul Hanna of Blue Technologies in Ohio, into a new era defined far more by digital services than by traditional office hardware.
Each of the three honorees has approached that generational transition differently, but all three describe the same underlying shift away from a hardware-centric business model toward a broader, services-oriented approach built around technology partnership rather than equipment sales alone. Hanna, who oversees Blue Technologies Smart Solutions, the managed IT and technology services arm of the Cleveland-based company, has described recognizing early on that customers needed considerably more than basic hardware support, a realization that led to expanding the business into managed IT services, cybersecurity, cloud communications, workflow automation, compliance, and business continuity solutions, transforming what had been an office equipment provider into a full technology partner for its clients. Aul, who serves as CEO of Systel Business Equipment, has leaned more heavily on strategic acquisitions as a growth lever, using them to strengthen the company’s market presence, expand its technical expertise, and open new expansion opportunities across the Southeast dealer market. Gorman, meanwhile, has been tapped to lead continued growth at DSI, driving transformative technology solutions for businesses across the Southwest as the company navigates the same industry-wide shift toward digital transformation.
The Cannata Report’s recognition of these three leaders continues a pattern the publication’s editorial team has tracked for years now, one where family-owned office technology dealerships are increasingly being modernized and expanded specifically by the daughters and successors who inherited them, adding managed IT, production print, and entirely new business verticals along the way. The 2026 Women Influencers issue also previews an upcoming Legacy Women Influencers Spotlight, a special Q&A panel set to debut online in August featuring past honorees reflecting on their own careers and the broader trends reshaping the channel.
Kim Scott Steps Into the C-Suite at CONTROLTEK
CONTROLTEK, the Bridgewater-based global leader in asset protection, intelligent inventory solutions, and tamper-evident packaging, has promoted Kim Scott to the newly combined role of Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Strategy. In her expanded role, Scott will continue overseeing the company’s global marketing organization while taking on considerably broader responsibility for corporate strategy, innovation, strategic partnerships, and the company’s long-term growth initiatives, working directly alongside CONTROLTEK’s executive leadership team to strengthen the company’s overall market position.
Scott’s rise within the organization reflects a steady progression rather than a sudden jump, having previously served as the company’s vice president of strategy and marketing after joining as senior director of marketing. Throughout that trajectory, she has been credited with elevating CONTROLTEK’s brand presence, expanding its thought leadership programs, sharpening its product marketing, and launching integrated go-to-market strategies that have helped position the company as a genuine industry leader across RFID, loss prevention, and cash management solutions. CONTROLTEK CEO Tom Meehan has pointed to Scott’s ability to connect strategic vision with day-to-day execution as central to why the marketing organization has become a genuine growth engine for the broader business, a track record that clearly factored into the decision to expand her authority into corporate strategy alongside her existing marketing leadership.
Before joining CONTROLTEK, Scott built her career across a genuinely varied set of organizations, leading teams and transformative programs at the American Heart Association and working on the Global Marketing and Events team at The Walt Disney Company, where she helped coordinate some of the company’s largest global press events. That blend of nonprofit, entertainment, and now security-industry marketing experience gives Scott a distinctive background as she steps into a role that now spans both brand strategy and broader corporate direction at CONTROLTEK.
Komal Dangi Earns a Spot on ROI-NJ’s Influencers: Women 2026 List
Komal Dangi, founder and CEO of the Edison-based IT staffing and verification company Synkriom, along with its patented product VeriKlick, has been named to ROI-NJ’s prestigious Influencers: Women 2026 list, an honor recognizing more than 300 women leaders across New Jersey whose vision and leadership have meaningfully shaped the state’s business and civic landscape. The recognition highlights Dangi’s excellence across corporate strategy, technology leadership, and community impact, reflecting a career that stretches well beyond her own company’s walls and into broader civic and economic development work across New Jersey.
Beyond her role running Synkriom, Dangi also serves as Vice President of Strategy and Growth at the Asian Indian Chamber of Commerce, where she additionally chairs the organization’s Certification and Technology Committee, driving initiatives aimed at advancing business innovation, professional development, and community impact within the state’s Asian Indian business community. With more than 15 years of experience in information technology and academic credentials that include a master’s degree in computer science alongside an MBA from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Dangi built Synkriom into a global IT staffing company supporting both onshore and offshore clients since founding it back in 2015, a foundation that eventually led to the development of VeriKlick, a web-based tool designed specifically to combat candidate misrepresentation and fraudulent resumes within the hiring process. Her recognition on this year’s ROI-NJ list adds to a growing string of statewide honors for Dangi, whose name has also appeared among New Jersey’s broader innovation economy leadership circles recognized at events celebrating the state’s technology and entrepreneurial community.
NJ Chamber of Commerce Reacts to New Jersey’s Slide in CNBC’s Business Rankings
Not every piece of business news out of New Jersey today carried the same celebratory tone. The New Jersey Chamber of Commerce issued a pointed statement following the release of CNBC’s 2026 America’s Top States for Business rankings, expressing clear disappointment that New Jersey slipped from 30th to 31st place overall as a state for doing business. The Chamber framed the drop as validation of concerns it has been raising for some time, arguing that economic competitiveness and stronger support for the business community need to become a genuine statewide priority rather than a secondary consideration.
What appears to have stung the most in this year’s rankings wasn’t simply New Jersey’s own decline, but exactly which states landed ahead of it. New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, the three states New Jersey competes with most directly for jobs, business investment, and broader economic growth, all ranked higher than New Jersey in this year’s assessment, a detail the Chamber highlighted as especially troubling given how directly those neighboring states draw from the same regional labor pool and business investment dollars. The Chamber’s statement made clear that continuing to fall behind those specific regional competitors represents a genuine risk to New Jersey’s long-term economic position, framing the rankings not as an abstract national exercise but as a direct measurement of the state’s ability to compete for the same jobs and investment dollars its closest neighbors are actively pursuing.
Taken together, today’s business news out of New Jersey captures both sides of the state’s economic story at once, genuine individual and organizational success stories playing out across the office technology, security, and staffing industries, set against a broader structural warning from the state’s leading business advocacy group about New Jersey’s competitive standing relative to the states it battles most directly for growth. Whether that warning translates into meaningful policy change in Trenton may end up shaping how many more of these individual success stories New Jersey continues producing in the years ahead.
