High-Tech Hopes

David Bankston says he knew it was a risk. After all, as the

manager of Web development at research database Lexis.com in Dayton,

Ohio, he enjoyed considerable responsibility and was well compensated, too.

But the 39-year-old was also ready to “do something new …

something highly creative … [that] would allow me to fulfill my entrepreneurial

side,” and the job he was considering offered all that. Besides, it was in a

little Florida town that sounded appealing. So he went to Naples and took a

look. “This is a nice place,” he decided. “The people are friendly, the streets

are clean, it’s safe.” Bankston and his wife moved to Naples, where he teamed

with attorney Kim Patrick Kobza to create what would become Neighborhood

America, a company that develops Web-based communications tools.

Neighborhood America now emp-loys 37 people and provides

technology for such projects as

Imagine New York, which invited people online to share ideas for the future of

the World Trade Center site, as well as for such private companies as the

Lutgert Cos., a Naples real estate developer. Some of the largest projects in

the country are “running on our technology,” says Kobza. “You could just as

easily take our company and put it in San Francisco or New York City.”

That’s just the kind of high-tech local success story that

Southwest Florida business leaders want to hear. Convinced that the old

strategy of wooing Northern companies to relocate to paradise is no longer

enough, economic developers are seeking to expand the region’s tourism-based

economy and raise the skills—and salaries—of workers with “new economy”

companies, from software developers to conventional busi- nesses that rely on

technology to enhance their operations.

Making the region a high-tech haven is a primary focus for

econ-omic development organizations in Charlotte, Collier and Lee counties. After

months of discussions with hundreds of technology executives,

telecommunications companies, community leaders and others, the counties have

created a regional task force, led by Florida Gulf Coast University’s business

dean, Dr. Richard Pegnetter, to help the region achieve its high-tech goals.

Collier economic development officials already use the

slogan, “Naples: High-tech’s best-kept secret.” But most admit that high tech

won’t become a visible part of the local economy without more regional cooperation,

a larger technically skilled labor pool and more high-speed Internet access and

other telecommunications infrastructure. Another need: more direct flights from

Southwest Florida International Airport to New York and the West Coast. Local

tech executives complain that the difficulty of getting to clients is Southwest

Florida’s primary disadvantage.

Economist Henry Fishkind of Orl-ando’s Fishkind & Associates credits Southwest Florida officials for recognizing those hurdles.

“They’re playing the right tunes, being realistic in that they’re not going to

be Silicon Valley Southwest. A lot of places are under that illusion,” he says.

In fact, Fishkind adds, economic development efforts in Lee and Collier are

“better focused than others in the state.”

He suggests that

FGCU could play a critical role in the same way that major research

universities help stimulate industry growth in Silicon Valley and the Research

Triangle in North Carolina. But FGCU, currently a small teaching university

rather than a research center, will have to increase its technology offerings

and expertise to do that.

That Charlotte, Collier and Lee are trying to identify

strategies to attract and retain tech firms puts them far ahead of many

counties, says Mike Freeman of HDR Management in Kansas City, Mo., a consulting

firm hired by the local economic development groups. “It all starts with

vision,” he says. “I sense that there’s a strong commitment.”

Meeting the Needs

One of the biggest challenges the region faces is mustering

the telecommunications infrastructure that technology companies require.

Infrastructure development is under way in other parts of the state, but not in

Southwest Florida, Freeman says.

Lee does boast a variety of services, including DSL, cable

modem, broadband wireless and competing firms serving high-speed data needs.

Several sonet rings, which provide a fiber-optic system that prevents data

transmission interruptions, are located throughout the county, including in the

Gateway area, home to major employers such as Sony, Sprint, Gartner and

FindWhat.com. Collier has fewer sophisticated networks, Freeman says, although

demand for such services is already there.

The region does enjoy proximity to a vital network access

point (which offers speedier Internet access and greater reliability) in Miami.

Jim Desjarlais, a technology business development specialist with Lee’s

economic development office, says the area could land a second tier network

access point in a year if it can convince provider Terramark NAP of the Americas

that there’s sufficient demand. That could be an important turning point, says

Tammie Nemecek of the Economic Development Council of Collier County. “So many

people have said, ‘Get that and you’re on the map.’”

More regional

cooperation, say Freeman and other observers, would speed the development of

such infrastructure; regional marketing efforts to high-tech companies would

also increase local economic developers’ effectiveness. Such marketing, they

say, should stress the region’s big selling points: quality of life and

national recognition as an attractive location for business. Those assets can

outweigh the lack of infrastructure and high-tech workers here, as recent

growth in the local technology industry shows.

Since 1995, the number of technology firms and workers in

Southwest Florida has more than doubled. Local economic development groups

estimate that Lee and Collier now have nearly 600 technology companies, from

large software developers to one-man Web developers, employing more than 10,000

workers in all. Two of the largest are Sony, with 695 employees, and

information technology firm Gartner Group with 330 workers, both in Fort Myers;

in Naples, ASG, a software and services provider, employs more than 200.

A Place to Prosper?

Although technology companies all around the globe have been

hammered in the past few years, several local companies are not only prospering

but planning expansions. FindWhat.com, a much-lauded local success story, will

move this fall into larger headquarters in Colonial Bank Plaza on Boy Scout

Road. Founded in Fort Myers, the company expects 2002 revenue to reach $37.5

million and hopes its 95 employees will grow to 150 by the end of the year.

“In terms of the infrastructure, Southwest Florida is a

challenging place to build a dot-com,” admits Craig Pisaris-Henderson, founder,

president and chief executive officer. “But at the same time, it was nothing

that we couldn’t overcome.”

In addition, Neighborhood America is doubling its space next

year with a new building on Vanderbilt Beach and Airport-Pulling roads in

Naples. Biotechnology company Arthrex, which designs and manufactures

instruments for arthroscopic and orthopedic surgery, plans to add 136 jobs when

its new world head- quarters and manufacturing facility is completed in Naples;

and F.N.B. Corp., a Naples-based, $6.7 billion diversified financial services

company, is building a new information technology center.

Local firms find that being based in Southwest Florida is no

hindrance in building a global clientele. RGB Internet Systems, which provides

Web hosting (housing and maintaining files for one or more Web sites), Web site

design and programming, has clients in countries such as England, India, Mexico

and Costa Rica as well as throughout the United States. RGB doesn’t need to

bring clients to their Naples office or travel to them because initial contact

is made through RGB’s Web site and a majority of the customer service is done

online. “The Internet is its own little world,” says co-founder Gabrielle Marvin.

The company, formed by Ralph Bayer, Marvin and husband Bill

Marvin, is in the black after a year in business. With a staff of

subcontractors, about 25 percent of its clients are local.

Being in Fort Myers is a personal choice for Bill Laakkonen,

who founded Internet Marketing 1 in 1996 and has built a client base beyond Lee

and Collier. “We would be better off, bandwidth-wise, to be based in a bigger

city, but here we are,” he says. “We’ve been here and we like it.”

Internet Marketing also has global clients. The company

serves the online market, offering anti-virus network security consulting, Web

hosting, domain name registration and virtual dedicated servers, which are

needed for sites that develop a considerable amount of traffic, such as 35

million hits a day. “You name the country and unless it’s very obscure we

probably have customers here,” Laakkonen says.

Collier’s Nemecek says employees leaving local tech firms to

start their own ventures are also bolstering growth; about a dozen new

companies have been formed that way. Alluna Group, a technology consulting

firm, was founded by four former executives from local technology companies,

including Fort Myers-based NeoMedia Technologies and Naples-based Fischer

International Systems Corp., the parent of software developer SmartDisk Corp.

Founded last year, the company already has several national and global clients

and plans to expand quickly.

High-tech executives and entrepreneurs want other successful

firms to join them in paradise. “The more the better,” says Neighborhood

America’s Kobza. “Having a strong technology industry starts to create the

critical mass necessary to support the communications discussion. Technology

companies tend to foster innovation through collaboration.”

Carol Conway, a Silicon Valley veteran who owns CRS

Technology, a Cape Coral-based firm that provides computer networking products

and services to businesses, agrees. “In tech hotspots such as Silicon Valley,

Boston, Austin, North Carolina—places where they’re cooking up products,

software and services—there is an intensity that is unique. It creates

competition, energy.”

Conway, who serves on the Horizon Council, Lee’s economic

development board and FGCU’s College of Business Advisory Board, says that

without such a concentration of high-tech expertise and energy, she envisions

second-generation product development in Southwest Florida. “The leading-edge

things happening in tech hotbeds are not likely to do well here,” she predicts.

“We don’t have this think-tank of computer scientists.”

Making Room for Technology