Microsoft Corp. plans to open a South Coast Plaza store, the second mall shop here for the software maker with a regional hub in Irvine.
The Costa Mesa store is set to open later this year and sell computers, Xbox video game consoles and Windows-based cell phones.
It’ll be Microsoft’s second Orange County store after one opened in Mission Viejo in 2009. It’ll be the company’s third in California after one in San Diego.
In all, Microsoft has eight stores with others in Arizona, Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois and near its Seattle-area headquarters.
Once the Costa Mesa store opens, OC will be home to a quarter of Microsoft’s stores and the only area with more than one.
The stores, which are designed to compete with stores from Apple Inc., are part of a larger operation here.
Microsoft has some 250 workers in the county, most at a technology center that’s among 11 in the country.
The company “has been an integral part of the OC community,” said Tyler Bryson, Microsoft’s top local official and general manager of the enterprise and partners group for the Southwest.
The Irvine office handles sales, marketing and customer service for Microsoft’s retail business, small-business customers, big corporations, resellers and governments.
Microsoft picked up some 90 workers in Aliso Viejo when it bought database software company Datallegro Inc. in 2008 for $275 million.
In 2007, Microsoft added on a flashy demo center, called the Microsoft Technology Center, to its local operations.
The tech center is a cross between a consulting firm and a sales office.
Business customers can get tutorials on how to better use Microsoft’s software and get help setting up videoconferencing, Internet phone service and document sharing.
The tech center also is used for training workers. And there are rooms that Microsoft resellers can use to hold customer meetings.
“It’s a hub of activity for Orange County and the only tech center Microsoft has for the seven states I’m responsible for,” Bryson said. “It’s so fundamental to what we do now.”
Customers
Microsoft serves big corporate customers here, including Irvine chipmaker Broadcom Corp., Irvine drug maker Allergan Inc., Brea-based medical testing products company Beckman Coulter Inc. and Santa Ana-based title insurer First American Financial Corp., among others.
The goal is to have centers within 100 miles of Microsoft’s biggest business customers. There are two dozen centers worldwide, with others in Texas, Chicago, Boston, Reston, Va., Silicon Valley, Atlanta and New York.
In the past year or so, Microsoft has hired locally for classified advertising sales amid a big search engine push with Bing.com.
Microsoft casts a long shadow here.
There are a slew of Microsoft resellers based here, including the biggest of all—Santa Ana’s Ingram Micro Inc.
Ingram, a technology products distributor, “is probably among the top Microsoft resellers in the world,” Bryson said.
Ingram sells and manages software licenses via its huge network of what are called value added resellers.
Microsoft sells directly to resellers as well as to what’s known as systems integrators, tech consultants that install and train companies on new products.
Bryson estimates there are some 500 systems integrators here, including Costa Mesa’s SpeakTech Inc., which was acquired by St. Louis-based Perficient Inc. late last year, QuickStart Intelligence Inc., which has offices in Irvine and Brea, and Anaheim’s New Horizons Computer Learning Centers of Southern California, part of KML Enterprises Inc.
Frenemies
Microsoft also has a complex network of local rivals, some of which resell or build upon its ubiquitous software.
“We have, in some cases, tremendous partnerships and competitive relationships in one,” Bryson said.
Makers of business software here with ties to Microsoft include Aliso Viejo’s Quest Software Inc., Epicor Software Corp. and others.
“We partner very closely with Quest,” Bryson said. “They help us deploy systems management software.”
Irvine-based Epicor, which had a recent market value of about $650 million, is both “a partner and a competitor,” he said.
“They build their application on top of our database,” Bryson said.
Microsoft is focusing its efforts here on cloud computing, which helps companies cut data center costs by outsourcing hefty software applications onto the servers of others.
An OC native who grew up in Brea and now lives in San Clemente, Bryson took the top post here more than a year ago.
He took over for Keith Otis, who headed the Southwest region from Phoenix.
