Tech Jobs Flourish in Metro North Region
Published Apr 17, 2007
Westminster-based Syncroness helps companies and individuals get products to market, everything from cell phones to turbine engines. It also has a contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop and demonstrate a chamber for testing vehicles at eight times the speed of sound.
The mile-high Metro North Region is a haven for technology-based companies, and its enterprising, highly skilled people are the primary reason why.
“That entrepreneurial mentality still exists here,” says Don Dunshee, president and chief executive officer of the Broomfield Economic Development Corp. “These people want the proximity to the university campus, and they also want the closeness of that technology mind to tap for either research or employment.”
Dunshee points to the University of Colorado, with campuses in Boulder and downtown Denver, as the training ground for much of the area’s knowledgeable workforce. Both campuses boast a College of Engineering and Applied Science and a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, with programs that include applied mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry, economics and physics.
The university and technology giants such as Sun Microsystems in Broomfield are incubators for high-tech startups, Dunshee adds. In fact, U.S. 36, which penetrates the Metro North area between Denver and Boulder, has emerged as a technology corridor for entrepreneurs and established companies alike.
Margaret Burd knows what it’s like to launch a technology-driven company. In 2001, she and several colleagues with Lucent Technologies in Westminster founded Magpie Telecom Insiders, also in Westminster and with another office in the southwest Colorado city of Durango.
A software development company, Magpie has 45 employees, including contract staff, and clients nationwide. Burd, president and chief executive officer, says business was slow the first couple of years, but now the burgeoning company is making up for that initial sluggishness.
“I think in five years we will be a $20 million company, and that kind of gross revenue means 100 to 120 people,” she says, adding, “Every customer, once we’ve done a project, they’ve asked us to do another project, which is why we are growing.”
While telecommunications software is the company’s bread and butter, Burd says the company is branching out into Internet-based television services and storage-area networking to help clients manage electronic data.
Magpie’s biggest customer is Avaya Inc., which designs, builds and manages communications networks for more than a million businesses worldwide. One of Avaya’s research labs is in an architecturally striking building in Westminster, conveniently across the street from Magpie.
Also in Westminster is the headquarters for Syncroness, a product development firm whose talented engineers can turn a good idea into a reality.
Companies and individuals retain Syncroness to help get a product to market. “That can be from the initial concept phase and taking it all the way through production. Or sometimes we’ll help companies that already have a prototype or completed another stage of their product, and we’ll come in with analysis or basic design work,” explains Chief Executive Officer Greg Langley. “We make sure the product will work as expected in the field.”
Syncroness employs about 40 people, most in the Westminster office, which includes a manufacturing laboratory to build and test prototypes. The company has had its hand in the development of products as diverse as cell phones, exercise equipment, turbine engines, pumps, surgical instruments and automotive retractable headlights.
In 2005, Syncroness was chosen by the U.S. Air Force to develop and demonstrate a high-altitude chamber to fully enclose a 10-mile-long, high-speed test track at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The chamber would allow scientists to reduce the air pressure that surrounds the track, thus simulating high altitude and enabling test vehicles to zoom along at eight times the speed of sound – which just about mirrors the pace of high-technology growth in Metro North’s vibrant communities.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Antony Boshier
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