CalAmp Corp.’s recent headquarters move from Oxnard to Irvine provides a boost in the middle market for Orange County’s roster of publicly traded tech companies.
The wireless service provider and products maker had long eyed OC for its home base, considering its top executive and other corporate personnel are based here, and its ongoing growth has been centered between here and San Diego.
“It just seemed like the appropriate time,” said Chief Executive Michael Burdiek, who lives in Laguna Beach. “For some time here really, the center of gravity has been in Orange County.”
The company employs about 450—50 of them in Irvine, where its IT, human relations, legal and some supply chain operations are based. About 85 workers are in Carlsbad, home to its mobile resources management business, which generates about half of the company’s annual revenue through manufacturing and selling telematics devices for car dealerships, law enforcement agencies and commercial fleets, among others.
The company posted revenue of $280.7 million and net income of nearly $17 million in the 12 months through February, the end of its fiscal year.
CalAmp was founded in 1981 and began trading on the NASDAQ in 1983, holding the distinction of being one of the oldest stocks on the tech-heavy exchange, where it had a recent market value of about $519 million.
It established an Irvine office in 2007 through its $19 million acquisition of Aercept.
OC has lost several hundred jobs since 2015 in the takeovers of several notable local public companies, including Broadcom Corp., Newport Corp., Ingram Micro Inc., Multi-Fineline Electronix Inc., Kofax Ltd. and Emulex Corp.
The companies had a combined market value of more than $41.3 billion.
App Power
A group of engineering students at California State University-Fullerton took home the $10,000 grand prize and bragging rights in the GE California State University Challenge.
The seven-member team’s Titan app, which allows students to track and analyze data from the school’s power sources and identify ways to reduce energy consumption in campus buildings, topped apps developed by San Jose State University, Cal State-Northridge, Cal State-Los Angeles and San Francisco State University.
The competition, which began March 24, challenged students to create a sustainable campus app using GE’s Predix cloud platform designed for industrial applications, and employing advanced computing, analytics, sensor technology, machine-to-machine communication and/or connectivity.
“CSUF’s Titan app, which compared three power sources and provided solutions to cut energy costs, stood out to me as the most original,” said Hima Mukkamal, head of engineering for Predix at GE Digital. “The app used data to provide both economic and environmental impact on the campus.”
CTO Named to Industry Board
Feyzi Fatehi, chief technology officer of Aliso Viejo-based cloud services provider Corent Technology Inc., has been named a board director of the Software & Services Division of the Software & Information Industry Association.
The Silicon Valley veteran, with more than 25 years of leadership experience, is chairman of the Orange County chapter of the Torrance-based Technology Council of Southern California.
Corent, which won a 2015 OC High-Tech Innovation Award in the Cloud/SaaS/Web Platform Solutions category, is a fast-growing company that has partnerships with Google, IBM, Dell, Amazon, Accenture, Cisco and Intel.
