53.2 F
Laguna Hills
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
-Advertisement-

Blizzard Says It Stands By Immigrant Employees

The human resources and legal teams at Irvine-based video game publisher Blizzard Entertainment Inc. are providing travel guidance, legal assistance and counseling to employees affected by President Donald Trump’s executive order barring refugees and other would-be immigrants in seven countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days.

Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen are populated predominately by Muslims.

“The executive order issued on [Jan. 27] directly affected a small number of our employees and their families, and supporting them is a priority for us,” Blizzard Chief Executive Michael Morhaime said in an email to employees. “The executive order strikes an incredibly sharp contrast with the values on which our company was founded. We are, and will always be, a company that strives for inclusion, embraces diversity, and treats one another with respect.”

Blizzard is OC’s largest software maker, employing 2,000 in Orange County and more than 4,000 worldwide.

The tech sector has been more affected and vocal on the ban than other industries, although several local companies declined to talk with the Business Journal on the matter.

The latest development comes as 100 influential tech companies, including Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Uber, sent a letter to Trump championing diversity and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and immigration reform.

$176.7M Loss

A $242 million acquisition by Irvine-based software company Vision Solutions Inc. has been sold for far less than its 2010 purchase price.

Santa Monica parent Clearlake Capital Group LP recently sold portfolio company Double-Take Software Inc. for $65.3 million to Carbonite Inc., a cloud data protection services company in Boston.

More than 140 Double-Take employees, including a handful at its Irvine office, will join Carbonite under the deal, according to Ed Vesely, Vision’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

Most of the employees of the Southborough, Mass.-based company are in Indianapolis.

Clearlake Capital, a private equity firm with about $3.5 billion in assets under management, separated Vision Solutions and Double-Take Software after acquiring Vision last June on undisclosed financial terms.

More than 12,000 customers in 70 countries use Vision Solutions’ software, which is designed to back up data and keeps servers running during maintenance or in the case of a disaster.

The company was OC’s 20th largest software maker last year, with an estimated 100 employees.

Not So Lucky

A Dallas jury has ordered Oculus VR Inc. and co-founders Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe—part-time OC residents—to pay $500 million to Zenimax Media LLC for copyright and trademark infringement and breach of a nondisclosure agreement.

The duo established the virtual headset maker in Irvine before Menlo Park-based Facebook Inc. acquired it in 2014 for $2 billion.

The three-week trial centered largely on video game programmer John Carmack’s work on the Rift headset during and after his tenure at Maryland-based Zenimax, which he left to become chief technology officer at Oculus.

Court documents and testimony by Luckey, Iribe and Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg provided fascinating insight into the inner workings of the company and the quick negotiations that led to the sale, which surprised many industry followers.

The deal, which provided a foundation that ultimately developed into a VR hub in OC, helped Luckey earn the Business Journal’s 2014 Business Person of the Year recognition in the tech sector.

Want more from the best local business newspaper in the country?

Sign-up for our FREE Daily eNews update to get the latest Orange County news delivered right to your inbox!

Previous article
Next article
-Advertisement-

Featured Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-

Related Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-