U.S. Companies Land In French Silicon Valley [ASND working with DT/FT/BT and ISPs]
techweb.com
(07/31/98; 1:44 p.m. ET)
By Alan Tillier, Contributor, TechWeb
A host of American technology companies, drawn by
the ability to hire top multilingual development engineers
more cheaply than in California and the development of
the Internet in Europe, have arrived in France's answer
to Silicon Valley.
There are now around 50 American high-tech
companies, employing 2,500 people, in Sophia
Antipolis, near Nice in southern France. The area is
spread over 6,000 acres of pine-studded landscaped
parkland, surrounded by Europe's most expensive real
estate.
Aside from sales and servicing across Europe, the
companies are increasingly engaged in the development
of systems. Cadence, the Californian electronic
design-automation company, now has 20 engineers
working in the park on software for chip design,
according to Jacques-Olivier Piednoir, local engineering
director at Cadence.
"It is becoming increasingly difficult to hire and retain
people in Silicon Valley. There's salary inflation in
California, but here a top man costs 60 percent of his
Californian counterpart, and that includes highFrench
social security and other charges," said Piednoir.
The latest arrival is Packet Engines of Spokane, Wash.,
a provider of gigabit networking solutions, which has
established a new European headquarters at Sophia
Antipolis. "We set up because of the huge interest from
companies in Europe," said Bernard Daines, Packet
Engines' president and CEO.
The park has now become a "hotbed of Internet
companies," according to Jon Axon, Packet Engines'
new European manager, and formerly of Bay
Networks, another U.S. company on the park.
Cadence's big European customers, such as Philips,
Siemens, Matra, British Aerospace, and SGS
Thomson, want support engineers close to them,
according to Piednor. "We can fly from here quickly to
just about anywhere in Europe," he said. U.S.
companies, such as VLSI, Mentor, Texas Instruments,
and Compaq have found a pool of skilled people in the
area. "It's a good place to find talent," he said.
Sophia Antipolis started as a science and arts park.
Pablo Picasso, who lived nearby, took a spade and
broke the first ground. Since then, it has become a
high-tech center rivaled in Europe only by Cambridge,
England's Silicon Fen technology area, in the view of
many experts.
Ascend, the fast-growing $1 billion Alameda, Calif.,
provider of integrated remote networking solutions,
now has 50 staff members on the park working with
European carriers such as France Telecom, Deutsche
Telekom, and British Telecommunications, as well as
with ISPs. It has moved staff to Sophia Antipolis from
Cascade, the Boston core switching company it
acquired last year.
"From here, we provide technical support, training, and
consulting in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East," said
Edgardo de Fonseca, Ascend's director of client
services. "This place is booming because of firms
integrating into Internet," he said.
U.S. companies are staging their first microelectronics
forum, devoted largely to electronic design automation,
at Sophia Antipolis Oct. 29 to show their products to
European companies and underscore their major
presence in the South of France. |
