Tech
Tech Comes of Age in Dallas-Fort Worth – dallasinnovates.com
[Image: Michael Samples. Logos: the companies]
COVID-19 has amplified everything. Every expense, inconvenience, and pain point has raised one thought for company leaders: How the heck do we deal with this?
The answer has accelerated a trend that’s been happening for years—the move of tech companies to Dallas-Fort Worth.
The search to reduce the friction of doing business led Antuit.ai CEO Craig Silverman to relocate his PhD-level artificial intelligence company from Chicago to Frisco nearly three years ago. Silverman himself lived in San Francisco for 10 years before moving to Dallas-Fort Worth to be closer to Antuit.ai.
“I just moved here from San Francisco two years ago,” Silverman says. “I know that ‘ocean fun’—it’s got its different vibe. But we’re an AI company that’s trying to help traditional brands transform their supply chain.”
While Antuit.ai says it can improve efficiencies for its customers by between 10 and 40 percent, the quality of its employees’ lives was floundering in Chicago, according to Silverman. “When you think about it, from an employee standpoint, you fight through the snow for five or six months, and the rain, and the rest,” he says. “And the commute—you’ve got to get through the Chicago traffic. And, oh, you’ve got to go visit a client in New York, and you’ve got to go through O’Hare? And then you’ve got to pay those state taxes.”
After a slight pause, Silverman shifts into a mode economic development professionals call “checking the boxes.”
“Then you think about what you’ve got here,” he says. “A super-safe place for families. Great school districts. And [DFW Airport, which] is as central a hub as O’Hare is. Then you’ve got that Legacy corridor, which is expanding, including NTT Data and others that have moved here.”
Between 2017 and 2020, DFW added more than 10,000 high-tech jobs—from computer systems analysts to electrical engineers to software developers and more—according to a Dallas Regional Chamber analysis of jobs data. Dallas recently landed second on CompTIA’s Tech Town Index 2020 for tech job openings, surpassing San Francisco. That’s a jump from seventh place last year.
“With the cost of living 2 percent lower than the U.S. average, more and more young people are putting down roots in this area,” CompTIA writes. “With a median IT salary of $94,044, plenty of live music and professional sports teams, tech professionals are finding opportunity and quality of life in Dallas.”
But to Silverman, it’s not about sports or the ping-pong table at Antuit.ai’s Frisco office.
“We’ve recruited people from all over—and obviously, there are some really good schools here, with good AI programs,” he says, noting the University of Texas at Dallas. “We’ve recruited people from all over the coasts who were tired of the hard-to-get-to-work in downtown San Francisco or New York.”
They come here as a lifestyle choice, Silverman says. “But they’ve actually come here to be part of a cool AI story. It’s a startup like you’d normally hear about in Silicon Valley.”
As he spoke, Silverman’s crew was working remotely at Antuit.ai, which also has offices in Chicago and India. The pandemic has put their spontaneous lunchtime brainstorming sessions on ice for now.
Will tech workers and others keep working remotely, even after COVID blows over? “It’s still too early to tell,” Clay B. Vaughn, senior vice president at CBRE says. “But once the pandemic is over, we think things are going to return to as close to normal as possible.” Currently, many believe that if workers are staying out of offices in the future, companies might not lease as much office space. Or, if they were previously thinking about relocating, why would they bother, if people are working remotely anyway?
Vaughn is with Silverman in believing that there’s no substitute for the role offices play—both in bringing people together and uniting organizations. But he thinks that offices will have to step up their games.
“Companies are going to have to make their office a destination where employees want to be,” he says.
“Dallas is on everyone’s radar, and I think we’re going to be the beneficiary of the impact COVID has had on our country. I think we will get 30-40 percent more companies relocating or establishing a significant presence in Dallas over the next five to 10 years. There’s doom and gloom in lots of markets around the country, but Dallas is filled with optimism.”
As companies from California to New York are looking at DFW, experts say the region has earned its stripes as a major player for tech companies.
One major checkbox that’s landed Dallas-Fort Worth on “everyone’s radar”: CBRE data that shows the region has a tech workforce approximating all large tech talent markets.
Based on an analysis of federal labor data compiled by CBRE in 2020, Dallas-Fort Worth is—by far—the most affordable metro among the top-five markets for tech workers. While the Bay Area and NYC might have substantially more tech workers, their cost of living is almost double DFW’s. Metro D.C.—which ranks third for most tech workers in major tech labor markets—has a cost of living that’s roughly 50 percent higher than Dallas, per the analysis.That data doesn’t include a cost-of-living or cost-of-doing-business comparison. But the cost of living in Dallas stacks up very well against San Francisco, NYC, Boston, and most of the other cities on CBRE’s list.
West and East Coast tech companies could benefit financially by moving to Texas, says Dehrel Seahorn, the senior delivery manager of direct hire services at BGSF staffing services.
Seahorn believes the region’s economy is growing even more attractive to tech companies with continued expansions and relocations to the area. “Not only does Texas have a lower cost of living, but also one of the lowest combined corporate tax rates, which make the area quite appealing,” he says.
“I see Dallas as a smaller version of New York City—with a lot of business being done,” says Alejandro Laplana, CEO of Shokworks. The firm has settled on calling Dallas home, Laplana says, which he attributes in part to the diversity of its economy and the availability of capital for investment. Shokworks, which creates digital products from existing analog projects, announced in Fall 2020 that it was moving its headquarters from Miami to Dallas. Its clients include Real Madrid, Kinesis Money, Dupont Chemicals, and Fox Sports.
“Everyone knows that commercial real estate is booming in Dallas,” Laplana says. “But even so, you can find some interesting enclaves. Right now we’re actively looking for office space. We found a spot in the Design District which is 5,617 square feet. We’re looking to create the ultimate maker space, an invite-only situation.”
Dave Cochran has a theory about what attracts people like Laplana and Silverman to the Dallas region. Sure, he says, there are all those boxes to check—no personal income tax, lower cost of living, relatively easier regulations, and more.
“It’s not only about money—people want to work for something greater than themselves,” says Cochran, the executive vice president at Colliers International. He believes there’s a spirit here that’s almost like a mission.
In a lifetime of traveling and living in cities including Chicago, St. Louis, and elsewhere, Cochran has learned that Texans have a sense of pride that exists in only a handful of other places, like California and New York City.
“Did I ever hear that when I lived in Chicago? Not really,” Cochran says. “L.A.? A little bit.” Californians are very proud of their state, and New York City is very proud of what it offers, he says. But Cochran finds Texans’ sense of pride to be “so pervasive” compared to cities like St. Louis, where he grew up.
“It’s not a perfect place by any imagination,” he points out. “We have our issues like every other metro area. But I think that the spirit that pervades this community is a little bit different than what you get in other parts of the country.”
That sense of mission isn’t confined to startups or relocations in North Texas.
Intuit found its way to Plano when it acquired Dallas-based software company Lacerte in 1998. Its employees contribute across Intuit’s business units.
“Intuit’s mission is to ‘Power Prosperity Around the World,’” says Intuit VP of Product Management Jorge Olivaretta. “Whatever prosperity means to our customers, we’re committed to make it happen. In Plano, we focus on automation and data insights for tax and accounting firms.”
Olivaretta says that the tech developed by his Plano team helps produce better financial outcomes for financial firms and their clients. Largely, that means working to automate much of the work accountants and tax preparers might be doing.
“We focus on the areas that can solve their biggest problems,” he says. “This requires artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science. It also requires thinking and working beyond our immediate customers. We collaborate on solutions that solve similar problems for customers across Intuit’s businesses.”
According to Olivaretta, collaboration is a key element of the company’s culture, which also emphasizes integrity, customer obsession, and giving back to the community.
“We learn and share innovation practices with other companies in North Texas,” Olivaretta says. “We don’t have all the answers, so learning is important. We also work with local organizations, like nonprofits, to solve their important problems. Our innovation model, Design for Delight, focuses on what matters most to these groups. Our employees volunteer and share their expertise to help them achieve their goals.”
Some tech names, such as Match Group, are homegrown and others, like Texas Instruments, have been here for a while. The region has fast-growing startups, like Alkami, and laser-focused firms, such as Cysiv. Many more tech innovators are ramping up with expansions in the region including WiPro, InfoSys, Atos, Facebook, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft. Rounding out the technology landscape is a cadre of top-tier tech enablers, such as Deloitte, Accenture, Infosys, and Slalom, that offer support.
Salesforce—which developed the leading global customer relationship management software—chose the Dallas region for its central U.S. operations for two big reasons, says Lance French, SVP of business technology: The company saw a rich talent pool and a cultural fit.
“Obviously, there was a highly skilled and diverse pool of talent to draw from,” French says. “But we also felt a strong sense of community in the area. This is a place where people care about each other and go the extra mile, and those values are deeply ingrained in Salesforce culture.”
An important part of that culture is “Ohana,” a Hawaiian concept that’s also one of Salesforce’s organizing philosophies. The idea is that Salesforce is a family—including employees, customers, partners, stakeholders, and members of the communities where it has offices—that is bound together in a sort of interdependent ecosystem.
“We take our Ohana culture very seriously and, while we’re growing at a rapid pace, we’re also very intentional about how we grow,” French says. “So we look for communities that share our values and have extraordinary talent and the ability to grow with us.”
Salesforce found what it was looking for in North Texas, according to French. Area universities are providing the talent the company needs to grow its workforce—particularly its Business Technology team.
“As an SVP for Business Technology, our internal IT organization, I also serve as the executive site lead for our Dallas hub,” he says. “That means I’m heavily involved in our recruiting and management operations in North Texas. Within Business Technology, we have hundreds of software engineers, developers, designers, product and project managers, change managers, and other IT leaders based here in Dallas. Our hub remains one of the top-growing global locations for business technology.”
As the Dallas-Fort Worth market has matured as a technology hub, a shared sense of mission is in evidence at many of the region’s tech firms.
At Cisco, where roughly 1,500 employees are working remotely from their North Texas homes, mostly in Richardson and Allen, COVID has expanded the company’s mission to help underserved communities access the internet.
“What we’re doing would probably fall more under economic development in helping to grow internet connectivity, for not only network connectivity, but also for the IoT,” says Cisco Regional Sales Manager Laura Baker.
In one local initiative, Cisco has partnered with the City of Dallas to install public Wi-Fi hotspots outside four libraries.
“I know children are in desperate need of basic Internet access, so they can do their homework,” says Cisco CIO Raja Singh.
Achieving that “ubiquitous internet” takes a village, said Nick Michaelides, Cisco’s SVP for the U.S. public sector, earlier this year. He said Cisco is proud of its initiative with the City of Dallas to provide Wi-Fi to underserved communities in this time of “seemingly essential need.”
That sums up tech and DFW in 2021: It’s a mutual gift that just keeps on giving.
Dave Moore is a data journalist and staff writer at the Dallas Regional Chamber.
Quincy Preston contributed to this story. A version was originally published in Dallas Innovates 2021: The Resilience Issue.
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Airlines, banks, hospitals and other risk-averse organizations around the world chose cybersecurity company CrowdStrike to protect their computer systems from hackers and data breaches.
But all it took was one faulty CrowdStrike software update to cause global disruptions Friday that grounded flights, knocked banks and media outlets offline, and disrupted hospitals, retailers and other services.
“This is a function of the very homogenous technology that goes into the backbone of all of our IT infrastructure,” said Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University. “What really causes this mess is that we rely on very few companies, and everybody uses the same folks, so everyone goes down at the same time.”
The trouble with the update issued by CrowdStrike and affecting computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system was not a hacking incident or cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike, which apologized and said a fix was on the way.
But it wasn’t an easy fix. It required “boots on the ground” to remediate, said Gartner analyst Eric Grenier.
“The fix is working, it’s just a very manual process and there’s no magic key to unlock it,” Grenier said. “I think that is probably what companies are struggling with the most here.”
While not everyone is a client of CrowdStrike and its platform known as Falcon, it is one of the leading cybersecurity providers, particularly in transportation, healthcare, banking and other sectors that have a lot at stake in keeping their computer systems working.
“They’re usually risk-averse organizations that don’t want something that’s crazy innovative, but that can work and also cover their butts when something goes wrong. That’s what CrowdStrike is,” Falco said. “And they’re looking around at their colleagues in other sectors and saying, ‘Oh, you know, this company also uses that, so I’m gonna need them, too.’”
Worrying about the fragility of a globally connected technology ecosystem is nothing new. It’s what drove fears in the 1990s of a technical glitch that could cause chaos at the turn of the millennium.
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” wrote Australian cybersecurity consultant Troy Hunt on the social platform X.
Across the world Friday, affected computers were showing the “blue screen of death” — a sign that something went wrong with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
But what’s different now is “that these companies are even more entrenched,” Falco said. “We like to think that we have a lot of players available. But at the end of the day, the biggest companies use all the same stuff.”
Founded in 2011 and publicly traded since 2019, CrowdStrike describes itself in its annual report to financial regulators as having “reinvented cybersecurity for the cloud era and transformed the way cybersecurity is delivered and experienced by customers.” It emphasizes its use of artificial intelligence in helping to keep pace with adversaries. It reported having 29,000 subscribing customers at the start of the year.
The Austin, Texas-based firm is one of the more visible cybersecurity companies in the world and spends heavily on marketing, including Super Bowl ads. At cybersecurity conferences, it’s known for large booths displaying massive action-figure statues representing different state-sponsored hacking groups that CrowdStrike technology promises to defend against.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is among the most highly compensated in the world, recording more than $230 million in total compensation in the last three years. Kurtz is also a driver for a CrowdStrike-sponsored car racing team.
After his initial statement about the problem was criticized for lack of contrition, Kurtz apologized in a later social media post Friday and on NBC’s “Today Show.”
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” he said on X.
Richard Stiennon, a cybersecurity industry analyst, said this was a historic mistake by CrowdStrike.
“This is easily the worst faux pas, technical faux pas or glitch of any security software provider ever,” said Stiennon, who has tracked the cybersecurity industry for 24 years.
While the problem is an easy technical fix, he said, it’s impact could be long-lasting for some organizations because of the hands-on work needed to fix each affected computer. “It’s really, really difficult to touch millions of machines. And people are on vacation right now, so, you know, the CEO will be coming back from his trip to the Bahamas in a couple of weeks and he won’t be able to use his computers.”
Stiennon said he did not think the outage revealed a bigger problem with the cybersecurity industry or CrowdStrike as a company.
“The markets are going to forgive them, the customers are going to forgive them, and this will blow over,” he said.
Forrester analyst Allie Mellen credited CrowdStrike for clearly telling customers what they need to do to fix the problem. But to restore trust, she said there will need to be a deeper look at what occurred and what changes can be made to prevent it from happening again.
“A lot of this is likely to come down to the testing and software development process and the work that they’ve put into testing these kinds of updates before deployment,” Mellen said. “But until we see the complete retrospective, we won’t know for sure what the failure was.”
___
Associated Press writer Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.
Transport providers, businesses and governments on Saturday are rushing to get all their systems back online after long disruptions following a widespread technology outage.
The biggest continuing effect has been on air travel. Carriers canceled thousands of flights on Friday and now have many of their planes and crews in the wrong place, while airports facing continued problems with checking in and security.
At the heart of the massive disruption is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
Here’s the Latest:
Microsoft: 8.5 million devices on its Windows system were affected
Microsoft says 8.5 million devices running its Windows operating system were affected by a faulty cybersecurity update Friday that led to worldwide disruptions.
A Saturday blog post from Microsoft was the first estimate of the scope of the disruptions caused by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s software update.
“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines,” said the blog post from Microsoft cybersecurity executive David Weston.
“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.”
Weston said such a significant disturbance is rare but “demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem.” Windows is the dominant operating system for personal computers around the world.
Austrian doctors’ group calls for better data protection for patients
In Austria, a leading doctors organization said the global IT outage exposed the vulnerability of health systems reliant on digital systems.
“Yesterday’s incidents underscore how important it is for hospitals to have analogue backups” to safeguard patient care, Harald Mayer, vice president of the Austrian Chamber of Doctors, said in a statement on the organization’s website.
The organization called on governments to impose high standards in patient data protection and security and on health providers to train staff and put systems in place to manage crises.
“Happily, where there were problems, these were kept small and short-lived and many areas of care were unaffected” in Austria, Mayer said.
Germany warns of scams after major IT outage
BERLIN — The German government’s IT security agency says numerous companies are still struggling with the consequences of a far-reaching technology outage.
“Many business processes and procedures have been disturbed by the breakdown of computer systems,” the BSI agency said on its website.
But the agency also said Saturday that many impacted areas have returned to normal.
It warned that cybercriminals were trying to take advantage of the situation through phishing, fake websites and other scams and that “unofficial” software code was in circulation.
The agency said it was not yet clear how faulty code ended up in the CrowdStrike software update blamed for triggering the outage.
European airports appear to be close to normal
LONDON — Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow, said it is busy but operating normally on Saturday. The airport said in a statement that “all systems are back up and running and passengers are getting on with their journeys smoothly.“
Some 167 flights scheduled to depart from U.K. airports on Friday were canceled, while 171 flights due to land were axed.
Meanwhile, flights at Berlin Airport were departing on or close to schedule, German news agency dpa reported, citing an airport spokesman.
Nineteen flights took off in the early hours of Saturday after authorities exempted them from the usual ban on night flights.
On Friday, 150 of the 552 scheduled inbound and outbound flights at the airport were canceled over the IT outage, disrupting the plans of thousands of passengers at the start of the summer vacation season in the German capital.
German hospital slowly restoring its systems after widespread cancellations
BERLIN — The Schleswig-Holstein University Hospital in northern Germany, which on Friday canceled all elective surgery because of the global IT outage, said Saturday that it was gradually restoring its systems.
In a statement on its website, it forecast that operations at its two branches in Kiel and Luebeck would return to normal by Monday and that “elective surgery can take place as planned and our ambulances can return to service.”
Britain’s transport system still trying to get back on track
LONDON — Britain’s travel and transport industries are struggling to get back on schedule after the global security outage with airline passengers facing cancellations and delays on the first day of summer holidays for many school pupils.
Gatwick Airport said “a majority” of scheduled flights were expected to take off. Manchester Airport said passengers were being checked in manually and there could be last-minute cancellations.
The Port of Dover said it was seeing an influx of displaced air passengers, with hourlong waits to enter the port to catch ferries to France.
Meanwhile, Britain’s National Cyber Security Center warned people and businesses to be on the lookout for phishing attempts as “opportunistic malicious actors” try to take advantage of the outage.
The National Cyber Security Center’s former head, Ciaran Martin, said the worst of the crisis was over, “because the nature of the crisis is that it went very wrong very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly and essentially it was turned off.”
He told Sky News that some businesses would be able to get back to normal very quickly, but for sectors such as aviation it would take longer.
“If you’re in aviation, you’ve got people, planes and staffs all stranded in the wrong place… So we are looking at days. I’d be surprised if we’re looking at weeks.”
Germany airline expects most of its flights to run normally
BERLIN — Eurowings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, said it expected to return to “largely scheduled” flight operations on Saturday.
On Friday, the global IT outage had forced the airline to cancel about 20% of its flights, mostly on domestic routes. Passengers were asked to take trains instead.
“Online check-in, check-in at the airport, boarding processes, booking and rebooking flights are all possible again,” the airline said Saturday on X. “However, due to the considerable extent of the global IT disruption there may still be isolated disruptions” for passengers, it said.
Delta Air Lines and its regional affiliates have canceled hundreds of flights
DALLAS — Delta Air Lines and its regional affiliates canceled more than a quarter of their schedule on the East Coast by midafternoon Friday, aviation data provider Cirium said.
More than 1,100 flights for Delta and its affiliates have been canceled.
United and United Express had canceled more than 500 flights, or 12% of their schedule, and American Airlines’ network had canceled 450 flights, 7.5% of its schedule.
Southwest and Alaska do not use the CrowdStrike software that led to the global internet outages and had canceled fewer than a half-dozen flights each.
Portland, Oregon, mayor declares an emergency over the outage
PORTLAND, Ore. — Mayor Ted Wheeler declared an emergency Friday after more than half of the city’s computer systems were affected by the global internet outage.
Wheeler said during a news conference that while emergency services calls weren’t interrupted, dispatchers were having to manually track 911 calls with pen and paper for a few hours. He said 266 of the city’s 487 computer systems were affected.
Border crossings into the US are delayed
SAN DIEGO — People seeking to enter the U.S. from both the north and the south found that the border crossings were delayed by the internet outage.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry was gridlocked Friday morning with pedestrians waiting three hours to cross, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Even cars with people approved for a U.S. Customers and Border Protection “Trusted Traveler” program for low-risk passengers waited up to 90 minutes. The program, known as SENTRI, moves passengers more quickly through customs and passport control if they make an appointment for an interview and submit to a background check to travel through customs and passport control more quickly when they arrive in the U.S.
Meanwhile, at the U.S.-Canada border, Windsor Police reported long delays at the crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
Latest
European Union accuses Microsoft of breaching antitrust rules by bundling Teams with office software
LONDON (AP) — Microsoft violated European Union antitrust rules with “possibly abusive” practices by tying its Teams messaging and videoconferencing app to its widely used business software, the bloc said.
The European Commission said Monday it informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that the U.S. tech giant has been “restricting competition” by bundling Teams with core office productivity applications such as Office 365 and Microsoft 365.
The commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, said it suspects Microsoft might have granted Teams a “distribution advantage” by not giving customers a choice on whether to have Teams when they purchased the software. The advantage might have been widened by limits on the ability of rival messaging apps to work with Microsoft software, it said.
“We are concerned that Microsoft may be giving its own communication product Teams an undue advantage over competitors, by tying it to its popular productivity suites for businesses,” Margrethe Vestager, the commission’s executive vice-president for competition policy, said in a statement.
“And preserving competition for remote communication and collaboration tools is essential as it also fosters innovation on these markets.”
The commission took aim at Microsoft a day after accusing Apple of breaching the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook, in a flurry of regulatory action underlining Brussels’ leading role as a watchdog for Big Tech companies.
Microsoft made some changes last year in an effort to head off an penalty, including offering the software packages without Teams for European customers. But the commission said Tuesday the changes are not enough to address its concerns and that it needs to do more to “restore competition.”
“Having unbundled Teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the Commission‘s remaining concerns.” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a prepared statement.
In April, the company also gave customers worldwide the option to get Microsoft 365 and Office 365 without Teams. The two software suites include programs like Word, Excel and Outlook.
Microsoft now has a chance to respond to the accusations, formally known as a statement of objections, before the commission makes its final decision. The company could face a fine worth up to 10% of its annual global revenue, or be forced to carry out “remedies” to satisfy the competition concerns.
The commission opened its investigation in July 2023 after rival Slack Technologies, which makes popular workplace messaging software, filed a complaint with Brussels. Alfaview, which makes videoconferencing software, also filed a separate complaint.
Slack, owned by business software maker Salesforce, had alleged that Microsoft abused its market dominance to eliminate competition — in violation of EU laws.
“The Statement of Objections issued today by the European Commission is a win for customer choice and an affirmation that Microsoft’s practices with Teams have harmed competition,” Salesforce President Sabastian Niles said. “We appreciate the Commission’s thorough investigation of Slack’s complaint and urge the Commission to move towards a swift, binding, and effective remedy that restores free and fair choice and promotes competition, interoperability, and innovation in the digital ecosystem.”
