Two of Orange County’s biggest technology companies are loading up on engineers.
Chipmaker Broadcom Corp. of Irvine and Aliso Viejo’s Quest Software Inc. added nearly 900 people to the ranks of their research and development teams in 2005, according to recent yearly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Combined, the companies grew their engineering workers by 28% from 2004, pushing the total to well more than 4,000 workers. Broadcom brought in more than 700 people in the past year,Quest more than 160.
About 180 engineers were added locally at the two companies. Others joined operations across the country and the globe. Many of the gains at Broadcom and Quest came via acquisitions.
The hiring hammers home how the technology slump early in the decade is a fading memory.
“You are only as good as your latest design win,” Broadcom spokesman Bill Blanning said. “It is important to have the right resources on hand.”
The two companies have added engineers at a faster pace than other technology companies around the county, according to the recent filings.
Conexant Systems Inc., a Newport Beach-based chipmaker, has boosted its engineering ranks. But most of those folks have come in low-cost India as the company works on a turnaround.
Newport Beach-based Mindspeed Tech-nologies Inc., a Conexant spinoff, saw a drop in engineers last year as the chipmaker worked to get back to profitability.
Irvine-based Epicor Software Corp. saw a slight decline last year in engineers after a big jump in 2004. Costa Mesa-based FileNet Corp., another software company, saw an increase in 2005, though it remained below 2003’s level.
Broadcom’s engineers design chips that go into set-top TV boxes, networking gear and in wireless phones.
Quest designs software that helps companies manage and monitor how databases and other applications from Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and others are working.
Broadcom added 729 engineers in the past year. The newcomers pushed Broadcom’s engineer count to more than 3,000 worldwide, up 32% from a year earlier.
That outpaced Broadcom’s overall hiring as total employment grew 27%, to 4,287 people.
Last year was Broadcom’s biggest year for hiring engineers since the downturn.
Engineers made up 70% of Broadcom’s headcount at the end of last year, up from 66% at the end of 2003.
In OC, Broadcom in the past year boosted engineers by 23%, or close to 150 people, to about 800 in all, Blanning said.
Broadcom’s total OC employees climbed by 200 to 1,400 people, a gain of about 17%.
Quest’s numbers weren’t as dramatic but showed similar trends.
The software developer expanded its research and development team by 17% last year. The additions pushed the number of research workers beyond the 1,000 mark for the first time.
The engineering gain didn’t keep up with Quest’s overall worker growth of 22%, putting its headcount at 2,763 people.
Quest came off one of its biggest years ever in 2004. The company expanded its research and development rolls by 41%, or 267 people, in 2004. Overall employee count was up 30.1% that year.
At the end of 2005, 39% of workers were in research and development, on par with 2004’s 40%.
In prior years, Quest’s engineers made up 36% to 38% of the company.
More than half of the new engineers last year came from acquired companies, said Scott Davidson, Quest’s vice president and treasurer.
Finding engineers who know about different software is key, Davidson said.
Engineers acquired in Quest’s $56 million buy last year of Utah’s Vintela Inc. know software from Microsoft as well as Unix, according to Davidson.
Quest is tapping the engineers to make some of its software work with Unix, an operating system used to run servers.
“Clearly, the most critical piece of a software company is the quality of your (engineers), and after that the ability to sell it,” he said.
Like Broadcom and others, Quest has spread its operations around the world,including Russia, Canada and Australia and New Zealand.
Last year, around 20% of Quest’s engineering hires ended up in OC.
Broadcom did not break out how many of its hires came from acquisitions. It’s safe to say several came from companies Broadcom bought.
The chipmaker recently bought Fremont-based Athena Semiconductors Inc. for $22 million. Athena designs chips so mobile phones can get TV signals. Athena has a design team in Bangalore, India, with 40 engineers and one in Greece with 23.
Broadcom has been hiring engineers for its 23 lines of business with more hiring in higher growth areas, including mobile phones and wireless networking.
In one case, Broadcom boosted spending on research and development early last year to make a chip that ended up in the video iPod.
Broadcom gives customers a chip with a “road map”,an outline of all the potential bells and whistles that can be added to it down the road, Blanning said.
That takes a strong research and development team, he said.
