About As California As You Can Get

Austin, Texas-based Dell’s new palm-tree adorned research center is located in the north section of Santa Clara, just south of the San Francisco Bay. By next year it will house about 700 Dell employees—mostly employees of several recently acquired companies.

CEO, chairman and founder Michael Dell said that were here because of the skills and talents of a great workforce that is willing to take risks to drive the new developments in our business around networking, cloud computing, security, the data center, mobility, software development—all the areas that Dell is focused on.

In welcoming Dell to his city, Mayor Jamie Matthews (at right) said that “back in the 1850s here in California, the people who made money weren’t the people searching for gold. The people who made money were those who found a way to support those searching for gold. Dell now personifies that smart business thinking.”??í Gov. Jerry Brown (left) told the audience that “what is needed in this economy today is investment, boldness and risk-taking, and I think the whole Dell company expresses that.”

Carrying out the venerable U.S. tradition of cutting a ribbon to open a new location, whether it’s a barber shop or an IT company, from left to right: California Gov. Jerry Brown, Michael Dell, Santa Clara Mayor Jamie Matthews, Dell Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Karen Quintos and Dell Vice President of Networking Dario Zamarian.

Dell’s new Santa Clara campus has plenty of room for new hires or additional acquisitions. In fact, on the opening day, the company was holding a job fair for applicants.

Scalent, which Dell acquired in 2010, has moved into the new complex. The company provides shortcuts intended to make data center infrastructure easier and more efficient to operate. Its former CEO, Ben Linder, now has moved on within Dell to become the corporation’s new executive director of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, a new business unit.

Staff members from another 2010 acquisition, Ocarina, will be situated on the new Dell campus. Ocarina brings second-generation deduplication capability to bundle inside Dell’s EqualLogic storage product line, which is aimed primarily at unstructured data in midrange enterprise-size data centers. Ocarina’s open-standards software includes compression.

Zing Systems, which Dell acquired in August 2007, provides wireless download technology for mp3 or digital music players. Dell has distributed Zings intellectual property to a number of devices, including its phones and tablet computers. Its employees will now work at the new Dell center.

Everdream, also acquired by Dell in 2007, produces on-demand software and managed services for desktop management, which Dell is using in many parts of its product line.

The new Dell campus sits next door to the headquarters of Marvell Technology Group, which for many years was the site of 3Com—creator of the Ethernet networking protocol.