On Fire.

• Author: Stewart, Heather Dawn
• Position: From the Editor

In January 2012, I wrote a story for Utah Business titled "From Sparks to Flames" that examined what it would take to push Utah's tech scene to the next level. The story touched on all the usual things: early-stage funding, state investments and support, a need for business incubators and a dearth of local tech leaders who had experience from the startup stage all the way through IPOs and billion-dollar acquisitions.

Well, times have changed.

In the 2012 story, Ryan Caldwell, then CEO of EnticeLabs and now CEO of MX, described a healthy technology ecosystem as a forest with large, mature trees, successful mid-sized trees and numerous young shoots. Utah tended to have lots of young shoots, but its mid-sized trees often would be acquired and pulled out of the state--leaving the fragile shoots with little protection and preventing the development of mature trees.

At the time, many bemoaned the frequent phenomenon of successful Utah tech firms being gobbled up by larger out-of-state companies, saying it drained the state of talent and depleted the industry's critical mass. But the past few years have shown the opposite result--some acquisitions have ended up bringing larger players to the state, creating, in a short period of time, that healthy ecosystem with small, medium and large companies.

For example: the 2009 acquisition of Omniture by Adobe, which led to Adobe setting up shop in Utah. In 2013 the firm built a showcase, 280-squarefoot building in Lehi and now employs well over 1,000 in the state.

A more recent example is the Dell EMC merger. EMC first came to Utah in 2007, when it acquired Berkeley Data Systems, the provider of Mozy. EMC decided to let Mozy keep operating in Utah and, over the years, gradually expanded its presence in...