TECH TITANS: Recent high-profile acquisitions make Silicon Slopes' footprint bigger.

• Author: Andra, Jacob
• Position: Cover story

Utah, like so many tech centers around the world, has its own Silicon (insert topographical feature here)--in this case, Slopes. With a couple of recent high-profile mergers, Silicon Slopes has gotten a lot more, well, silicon-y. One of these, Ivanti, involved a homegrown firm pairing up with another tech company to launch a new brand. The other merger comprised outside companies with a significant Utah presence. In this latter scenario, we're talking about no less than the Dell/EMC alliance.

Dell, the gargantuan maker and assembler of PCs, is on the move, and part of its massive footprint falls in the Wasatch Front. When it acquired data firm EMC in September 2016, Dell became the world's largest privately held tech organization, bar none. The acquisition itself was the largest tech merger in history.

A tiny startup brings a tech giant to Utah

A homegrown firm named Berkeley Data Systems founded the popular backup software brand Mozy in American Fork in 2005. Massachusetts-based EMC gobbled up Mozy two years later. At the time, EMC opted to keep Mozy at the latter's Utah Valley headquarters, and over the years EMC expanded its presence in Utah. Last year, when Dell acquired EMC, it saw no reason to uproot the EMC operation in Utah. Rather, through each upheaval, the new owners have expanded the Utah division. Today Dell's Mozy division is nominally based in Seattle but continues the majority of its activity from its ancestral home.

"At every turn in the road there have been a lot of interesting challenges and opportunities," recalls Vance Checketts, former Mozy COO. "It's definitely been a dynamic environment through all of these restructurings."

Checketts stayed with Mozy when it joined EMC, and later stayed with EMC when it merged with Dell. Today, he holds the title of vice president and general manager at Dell EMC and oversees the Utah and North Carolina territories.

"The Utah team has grown by a thousand people in the past five years," Checketts reflects (it's now 1,300 strong). He anticipates that growth to continue. "The Utah operation serves so many different roles in the global Dell portfolio."

EMC is primarily a data company. Dell has been about hardware. Like EMC, many of Dell's acquisitions--VMware, SecureWorks and Pivotal, for example--are software firms. If Dell is a three-legged stool--hardware, software and big data--the Utah node plays a role in all three legs. And with Utah being rated so highly nationwide for its business-friendly features, we can reasonably expect Dell to grow its Utah presence.

"Not only should we expect significant job growth in Utah," as the local Dell operation expands, according to Checketts, "but the variety of job opportunities is virtually unlimited." A software engineer could try her hand at sales or customer service. An account manager might want to...