Maybe you should call it the Blizzard King.
For at least a decade, video gaming company Blizzard Entertainment Inc. in Irvine has been ranked as Orange County’s largest software company by headcount, with an estimated 2,800 employees this year according to the Business Journal.
Blizzard Entertainment’s parent company, Activision Blizzard Inc. in Santa Monica this month released second-quarter earnings that far outpaced expectations, as the coronavirus pandemic kept people at home and gaming.
The pandemic forced the developer of such titles as Hearthstone and Overwatch to cancel its annual BlizzCon fanfest in Anaheim this year and said it will go online with the event early next year.
“We are planning on channeling the spirit of BlizzCon into a virtual event early—in the early part of next year,” Blizzard Entertainment President J. Allen Brack told financial analysts on a conference call. His company’s estimated number of employees this year is the same as 2019.
IBM, Oracle
The total headcount for the 23 companies on the Business Journal’s ranking dipped 2.1% to 8,536 from 8,721 last year.
The other three top places on this year’s list also remained unchanged with IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and Ultimate Software Corp. ranking 2, 3 and 4, respectively. IBM’s estimated OC headcount was unchanged at 1,200, while the estimate for Oracle is also unchanged at 500. Ultimate nudged upward a bit from 420 to 439.
Charging up from 10th place to fifth by headcount this year is data analytics software maker Alteryx Inc. of Irvine, with 352 OC employees.
Stoecker Confident
Alteryx is the highest-ranked software company with headquarters in Orange County. Chief Executive Dean Stoecker looks confidently toward the future.
“We’re quite bullish on what’s going to happen as people start to emerge from COVID,” Stoecker said on a conference call earlier this month.
NextGen Healthcare Inc., a telehealth software provider also headquartered in Irvine, moved up two notches to sixth place this year, even though its headcount slipped from 333 to 301.
BlackBerry Cylance
BlackBerry Ltd. (NYSE: BB), which purchased Irvine’s internet security Cylance last February, slipped from No. 5 last year to No. 7.
BlackBerry has offered to sublease a large amount of Cylance’s space in the Irvine Spectrum area, leading to questions about its long-term commitment to the company’s local roots.
Canada-based BlackBerry through a company spokesperson told the Business Journal earlier this month: BlackBerry will “continue to operate and occupy the current Irvine office space/location.”
Irvine-headquartered Acorns Grow Inc., whose web app rounds up spare change from customers and places the money in an investment account, moved up two places to No. 9, though its estimated local headcount was stable at 240 this year.
Irvine-based Mavenlink Inc., which provides software for streamlining companies’ workflows, added five people this year to give the company a headcount of 170. The company ranks No. 13 tied with Kofax Inc.
Veritone Inc., a Costa Mesa-based company seeking to capitalize on artificial intelligence, slipped one spot to No. 18 on the software companies list, as its headcount dipped from 163 to 141.
Next VR Inc. of Newport Beach, which provides content for virtual reality headsets, was bought by tech giant Apple Inc. and was removed from this year’s list after ranking 23rd last year.
