Most people who know much of anything about Silicon Valley are aware of the fact that some of the world's largest technology corporations call this part of Northern California’s Bay Area home. Although other high-tech economic centers have sprung up worldwide, Silicon Valley remains the number one epicenter of high-tech development and innovation. The entire Santa Clara Valley including Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Los Altos and San Jose, as well as the southern portion of the East Bay and the southern peninsula comprise Silicon Valley.
Thriving tech businesses in Silicon Valley include Hewlett-Packard, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, Adobe Systems, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Cisco Systems, Facebook, Apple Inc., EBay, Google, NVIDIA , Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Yahoo!, VMware, Adobe Systems and literally thousands more. Just to mention a few more, there is Juniper Networks, Marvell Technology Group, LSI Corporation, Maxim Integrated Products, National Semiconductor, KLA Tencor, Symantec – the list is far too long to include here. Suffice it to say that a large number of the world’s leading tech businesses (many of them Fortune 1000 concerns). Fry’s Electronics superstore chain is also a Silicon Valley resident.
With all the outsourcing to countries including India and China that’s gone on in recent years, many U.S. high tech executives have been concerned about U.S. loss of technology jobs. However, an interesting turn of events has come about lately. Several foreign countries are turning to hiring Silicon Valley engineers. In particular, many European and Asian companies are utilizing the skills of the Bay Area’s high-tech expertise for such endeavors as research and design of cutting-edge products.
Santa Clara houses Huawei Technologies Co’s new R & D center. Huawei is a high tech communications firm which currently employs over 500 employees at this location. Telefon AB LM Ericsson’s chief technology officer works out of San Jose rather than from company HQ in Stockholm. Their R & D department employs over 1,200.
Some other foreign companies with large technical staffs here include Nokia Corp of Finland, Japan’s Fujitsu and Alcatel-Lucent of France. The primary hiring category that we see large overseas companies using is that of communications.
In July, 2011, some of the U.K,’s most active health technology companies are traveling to Silicon Valley in a large scale attempt to promote British innovations across the globe. This “Future Health Mission” is being managed by Polecat, a substantially large scale software company.
Although the dot-com bust was responsible for the demise of several Silicon Valley businesses, it’s plain to see that it’s still looked to as a leader in the high tech field, and undoubtedly will continue to remain so, Stay tuned for updates, new inventions and innovation from this powerful leader in its field. |