Technology.

• Position: Industry Outlook - Interview - Company overview

Utah's technology sector is hot. In the past decade, the industry has grown to 6,000 companies in the state, representing tens of thousands of jobs. But tech leaders struggle to find talented workers locally and must overcome many misperceptions about Utah when trying to recruit from out of state. Our panel weighs in on these challenges and sounds a note of strong optimism about the future of technology in the state.

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We'd like to give a special thank you to Richard Nelson, president and founder of the Utah Technology Council, for moderating the discussion and to Holland & Hart for hosting the event.

Finding talent has long been an issue for Utah's tech industry. Describe your company and its staffing needs.

LINTON: I'm the CEO and president of the School Improvement Network. We're focused on improving the quality of schools through high quality resources that are online and other ways. We have hired 55 people this year and now have about 150 employees. We'll hire another 31 through the remainder of this year. We continue to grow at about 70 to 100 percent a year, and expect to continue that for the next probably three to four years. With the changes that have happened in a lot of companies, we've been able to find great people. We have a lot of highly-educated people, MBAs, that have joined us.

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KARANJIKAR: Ceramatec is about research and development, particularly in clean tech and some medical products. We have about 170 employees here in Salt Lake City. We are a wholly owned subsidiary of Coors Tek, which is roughly 5,000 employees around 13 different locations in the world.

As far as hiring challenges-we work in a very specific area. And so the sample space, that is becoming smaller and smaller as you look for more expertise and depth, which has been a constant challenge. And we are fairly picky about the type of people we hire. In the last year, we probably increased our workforce by almost 10 percent.

SEELEY: I'm IP director at Crocker Ventures, and I also run one of our startups. We provide seed capital in really early stage development. We have about 15 FTEs. We actively manage five startup companies right now, and we have some passive investments, where we invest in other companies from time to time.

OLSEN: I'm vice president of Intellisys. We are a local telecommunications company specializing in phone systems, dial tone, internet, cell phones, networks, that kind of stuff. We currently have about 20 employees. We hired about three or four in the last year, and we currently have positions for another four or five.

HALL: I relocated from New York two years ago to start up Goldman Sachs' application development business team here in Salt Lake. We've run that team from about zero to 200 in the last two years.

Goldman, obviously, is known as a financial services industry. But what people don't realize is the largest division at Goldman is actually technology. We have more technology professionals than we have bankers, traders or any other career skill set.

CULLIMORE: I'm president of Dynatronics Corporation. We're a manufacturer of physical therapy equipment in the medical device space. We have about 200 employees, half of them in Utah. We've hired probably 10 to 15 in the last year.

NELSON: I'm the president and CEO of Nelson Laboratories. We work with companies to make sure their products are safe, sterile and functional-primarily focusing in the medical device space, but also some ancillary industries such as tissue, pharmaceutical, dietary supplement. We are right on the cusp of 400 FTEs. We are continuing to hire. We've probably added, year to date, about 20 to 25 people.

ARCHIBALD: I'm the CEO and founder of Management Plus. We're an electronic health records company. We have about 20 FTEs. About 75 percent of our employees are based here in Utah, the other are all over the country. We've hired about three new people this past year. We have two current openings- one position in particular we are really having a difficult time hiring for because it's very specialized. We changed the focus of the requirements, and we still weren't able to get somebody here in Utah. So now we've gone national to see if we can find somebody.

TURLEY: I'm with a company called i.t.Now. We're a local IT service provider. What we really focus on is trying to provide technology solutions for small businesses-mostly in Utah, but we also have some national clients-so that small business owners can get back to doing the work they know how to do, as opposed to trying to do the work we know how to do.

We've had about four new hires this year alone. We've got about 60 full-time employees. The interesting hiring challenge that we're having is there seems to be a shelf between employees that are largely unskilled in the technology space for what we do versus employees who are a little bit more skilled. There's really a gap. There's about a 15 percent increase in salary between these people who are unskilled and interested and people who are skilled, but require a much larger amount of pay. So it's a hiring challenge for us to allocate budget for hiring somebody, but also getting the skills we need.

HELLEWELL: I'm senior vice president of product development at Spillman Technologies. We're in the public safety software business. We sell our software to police departments, sheriff's offices, jails, emergency dispatch centers.

We have 230 employees now and 10 openings. Most of those are for software engineers. And we've hired 15 to 20 employees in the last 12 months. Our challenge is in finding software engineers. They're hard to come by right now, especially experienced Java developers.

CHECKETTS: I was the COO of Mozy when it was acquired by EMC in October 2007. My title now within EMC is vice president of operations. We've got- between Mozy, Iomega and EMC-about 300 employees in Utah. But I have 500 openings right now. It's a pretty daunting, but very exciting challenge.

Our challenges are three-fold. A lot of those jobs are going to be technical support jobs for the Americas. So we want technical people that are also at least bilingual, so Spanish and Portuguese. That's a challenge. We get a lot of resumes that are call-center-type employees, and that's not what we're building. We're building a technical support center. These are career, very technical, very professional-types of roles. The third challenge is really the partnership with universities in particular. We see a void in terms of cloud computing. You really don't see those kinds of courses being taught in the universities right now. If we had the right courses in those universities, the right partnerships with technology companies, that would help fill this gap of people who are coming out with degrees, who are also trained in the right emerging technologies.

BRUNI: I'm the general manager of business operations and senior director...