New Dell Campus Opens, Company Looks to Hire 200 New Employees

Dell on Wednesday announced plans to add nearly 200 jobs at its new nearby campus on Great America Parkway in Santa Clara. The new campus, which opened Wednesday, will focus on research and development.

The company's chairman and CEO, Michael Dell, said that by the end of 2012, roughly 700 people will work at the new facility doing network design, storage development, cloud computing, and software development.

Gov. Jerry Brown attended a 10:30 a.m. ribbon-cutting at the campus Wednesday.

"We continue to be a place of pioneers, of people who have left one place to come over and make something better," Brown said. "And that's the genius of California. So I say, 'Welcome, Dell.' You're joining pioneers, and you're going to help promote the pioneering spirit for the state of California."

Following remarks by the governor and Santa Clara Mayor Jamie Matthews, Dell cited Silicon Valley's talent pool as one of the reasons for the company's expansion there.

"We're here because of the talent, the highly-skilled workforce that will enable Dell to continue to innovate, to take risks, to drive the new developments in our business," Dell said.

The 240,000-square-foot, two-building campus includes customer solutions and briefing centers, a cafeteria, and a fitness center. The Silicon Valley campus complements Dell's other research and development center in Ra'anana, Israel, and development work at the company's headquarters in Round Rock, Texas.

"Our ongoing expansion here in the United States is proof that with the right skills and talent, companies can grow and thrive, even in a challenged economy," Dell said.

The new facility will allow Dell to consolidate several local companies the company has acquired, including Zing, Ocarina, Scalent, and Everdream. Two other companies, KACE and Force10, will remain at their current Silicon Valley facilities.

According to a press release issued by Dell this week, the company is seeking to hire around 200 qualified candidates, largely for positions in storage, networking, software and hardware engineering. In addition to Dell, the company is also looking to fill positions to expand the sales and engineering activities of its other companies, including storage engineering at Ocarina Networks, networking engineering at Force10 Networks, systems management at KACE, and virtualization at Scalent, in addition to cloud services and mobility development.

For more information about career opportunities at Dell, go to http://jobs.dell.com.

- Bay City News contributed to this report