AT&T eying Atlanta for high-tech innovation center (Alpharetta: buying, compensation)

[nature's message]

AT&T is considering Atlanta for a high-tech innovation center that would bring dozens of sought-after research jobs to the metro area and create a powerful incubator that could generate more startups across the city.

AT&T eyeing Atlanta for sought-after research hub | www.ajc.com

[cqholt]

Hope they build it in Midtown.

[Mutiny77]

It would at least be a little compensation for swallowing up BellSouth.

[dichloromethane]

Does this mean I'll finally get service downtown?

[MathmanMathman]

I'm surprised in a way that AT&T is viewed this way. Like IBM, AT&T was a behemoth in high tech but both have been greatly marginalized.

[SEAandATL]

I hope it choses Atlanta. It will be really good for the economy. It can also help Atlanta's image in being a hi-tech city and not a city that is behind the times.

[arjay57]

Originally Posted by MathmanMathman

I'm surprised in a way that AT&T is viewed this way. Like IBM, AT&T was a behemoth in high tech but both have been greatly marginalized.

I thought IBM was still a big deal. Is that no longer the case?

[BobKovacs]

Originally Posted by cqholt

Hope they build it in Midtown.

Seeing how the two current facilities in the US (Plano, TX and Palo Alto, CA) are located in 2-3 story suburban office park type buildings, I highly doubt they'd be paying Midtown rents for a new facility in the Atlanta area. I'd see it being more in Alpharetta, Duluth, etc., where all the other corporations that don't need high-rent space are going.

[Mishap]

Originally Posted by BobKovacs

Seeing how the two current facilities in the US (Plano, TX and Palo Alto, CA) are located in 2-3 story suburban office park type buildings, I highly doubt they'd be paying Midtown rents for a new facility in the Atlanta area. I'd see it being more in Alpharetta, Duluth, etc., where all the other corporations that don't need high-rent space are going.

I'm actually working w/ them and have been out to their Palo Alto center. It's definitely not big but it's in a nice area and I'm guessing space in Palo Alto isn't cheap (there are no office towers anywhere) and it's walking distance to Stanford. The idea isn't a massive top-secret facility w/ thousands of engineers trying to invent cold fusion or get an iphone to hold a signal. It's very much a startup model where they allow creativity and entrepreneurship to take the lead over normal corporate IT process. They avoid a lot of walls/offices, whiteboard stuff everywhere, dress completely casual, and really try to live up to being in Silicon Valley.

That said, they still work for the death star company. A lot of their ideas won't pan out b/c they're working for an absolutely massive company that simply can't move that quickly. Some of their ideas run counter to security/privacy requirements that a telco is subject to. Things that tech companies get away w/ much easier by moving faster than regulators. What you wind up w/ instead is a very pretty development center where they hold lots of press junkets and analyst meetings to show off how innovative they are w/ some slapped together concepts that rarely move to production.

Given how little space they need and how counter-corporate they're trying to place these, I highly doubt they'll share space w/ any existing AT&T facility even though they still own/lease half the buildings in the city. They'd far more likely drop it in Tech Square just for the marketing cachet since anonymous office parks in Norcross/Alpharetta are so cost conscious and white bread much like the rest of the company.

On another note, maybe a couple dozen people work in these centers b/c they are so expensive (don't exactly create a lot of revenue) and it's unlikely to do much to our local economy other than a couple incremental developers/admins and a cool looking space to do marketing events.

[Mishap]

Originally Posted by arjay57

I thought IBM was still a big deal. Is that no longer the case?

They're still a Fortune 20 company w/ north of $100B revenue and 400,000+ employees. They just stopped slinging PCs so consumer brand awareness isn't as big a deal anymore. Also it minimizes the fact that a whole lot of their workers are offshore and they're going around buying up IT groups of F500 companies to take over service contracts, layoff the local workforce, and offshore everything.