Boulder – It all started in 1956 when a group of undercover engineers began talks with the local chamber of commerce. Without knowing which company the engineers worked for, the chamber spent a year helping them locate and study more than 800 acres of farmland.
Nine years later, IBM Corp. opened its Boulder plant at the intersections of Colorado Highways 52 and 119. The company purchased the Fullen Farm for $117,000, the Jones Farm for $61,000 and the Dodd Farm for an unspecified amount. The land was annexed to Boulder so water and sewer lines could be built.
“It was a bold step for IBM to come out in the middle of an agricultural community and start a site for a technology company,” said Larry Longseth, senior location executive for IBM Boulder.
This week, the Boulder campus will celebrate its 40th anniversary complete with festivities for employees, retirees and state officials.
IBM Boulder consists of 24 buildings covering 2.4 million square feet – about twice the size of Denver’s largest shopping mall.
A total of 4,500 employees work here across 20 IBM divisions, including printing systems, design engineering, software and global services. The company, which has a local payroll of $500 million annually, is the biggest technology company in the state and the largest private employer in Boulder County.
Today, IBM Global Services – the division that monitors and maintains business networks – encompasses the majority of the Boulder site with 3,400 employees. When the site opened on June 28, 1965, it was primarily a manufacturing plant making parts for one of IBM’s first computers. It quickly hired 2,000 employees.
“We made part of the basic operating memory unit, which was made up of little iron-and-metal doughnuts not bigger than the head of a pin,” said Jim Pilkington, a retired IBM manager who began at the company in August 1965. “We ran three wires through it, and they were shipped to Poughkeepsie, N.Y.,” to go into the computers.
The changes in Boulder are characteristic of the shift IBM has made over the past two decades from a core computer manufacturing company to a client services and consulting company. Although the Armonk, N.Y.-based company still makes hardware and software, 50 percent of its revenues come from the Global Services division.
IBM Boulder began moving from manufacturing and into software and services in 1985. The transition in Boulder alone cost $120 million.
There was never any talk of shutting down or diminishing the size of the Boulder operation, Longseth said.
“We recognized that we made some investments here that should be a benefit to IBM in the future,” he said. “It wasn’t hard making strategic decisions around staying here. Those investments served us well in Boulder to support the growth we ended up having in the 1990s.”
However, the change presented a huge cultural challenge for workers, he added.
“People were focused on getting a product out the door and shipped to the customer,” Longseth said. “The shift here is that the focus by every person here is on our customers and whether or not the solutions are meeting our customers’ needs and making them more successful.”
The impact IBM has had on the area is significant. The company and its employees pay more than $40 million annually in state, sales and property taxes. There’s also a firm commitment to community involvement, Longseth said, with IBM Boulder donating $1.4 million in cash and technology to Colorado schools and nonprofit organizations in 2004.
“Most of those companies do a large amount of charitable work no one knows about, and IBM has certainly done their part,” said Tom Eldridge, Boulder’s deputy mayor. But one of the biggest effects the company has had is in the area of innovation.
“IBM’s locating in Boulder was the beginning of some of the high-tech companies coming to our area and the Front Range,” Eld ridge said. “They were the first significant private employer.”
In addition to more technology businesses being encouraged to settle in the area, more than 80 companies have been founded by IBM employees, such as StorageTek, Lexmark and Exabyte.
“IBM has created thousands of jobs and dozens of other companies in the area, such as people building testing equipment to support IBM,” said Susan Graf, president and chief executive of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce. “It’s been an incredible boost to the storage industry in the Boulder area. They’re still the big name, still the top dog.”
Staff writer Kimberly S. Johnson can be reached at 303-820-1088 or kjohnson@denverpost.com.
