Wichita is stepping up its tech game

Wichita is a high-tech town.

Really.

It’s just that most of the technology and technologically trained people work for nontechnology companies.

The Brookings Institution lists Wichita as having the third-highest concentration of people in advanced industries in the U.S. – 15.5 percent of the city’s workforce – largely because of 26,000 workers in the highly technical aerospace industry. Precision manufacturing can be considered high-tech.

But some people say Wichita has lagged in the nation’s rapid shift into information technology, with its computer hardware and software, data mining and phone apps, driverless cars and smart appliances. They see tech hubs booming in Austin and Boulder and developing in Kansas City, Des Moines and Omaha.

Wichita has a number of pure technology companies, of course, such as NetApp, High Touch Technologies, Cybertron PC, InfoSync, Integra Technologies, LendingTools and many more. But Wichita does seem to lag in IT.

Here’s one way to measure: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2013 listed about 6,000 people in the the Wichita area as working in computer- and math-related occupations such as programming, managing computer systems and analyzing databases. That’s about 2.1 percent of the workforce.

In Kansas City and Des Moines, it’s 3.7 percent. In Omaha, it’s 3.9 percent. In Austin, it’s 5.9 percent, and in Boulder, it’s 6.7 percent.

NetApp’s partnerships

But there are some signs that IT as a stand-alone sector is slowly accelerating in Wichita.

NetApp, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has a research facility at 3718 N. Rock Road. The company is a world leader in the development and manufacture of hardware and software for data storage systems. The Wichita plant does world-class work; its employees have compiled scores of patents over the years.

The company has been expanding in Wichita, with plans to add 400 employees between 2012 and 2017, or nearly doubling its workforce.

Four hundred more IT jobs are nice, but what’s more important is that NetApp has strengthened the local pipeline for computer and electrical engineers.

Joel Reich, senior vice president of the NetApp Hyperscale Storage Group, said the company inherited a cadre of longtime veterans when it bought LSI’s data storage division in 2011. But growth was a problem. Wichita doesn’t have a cluster of data storage companies or a pool of storage engineers waiting for jobs.

So NetApp reached out to Wichita State University, as well as other regional universities, to establish partnerships with computer science and electrical engineering departments. They offered internships to students and jobs to graduates. The students are happy because they get real training and jobs. The company is happy because it has a pipeline of new employees. And the university is happy because it gets access to real-world technology and research and can promise its students a clear future.

“I don’t think it would have grown into what it has grown into without WSU being four miles away,” Reich said.

NetApp has taken a lead role as a private partner in WSU’s Innovation Campus, contracting for work in WSU’s new Applied Technology Acceleration Institute.

NetApp is also looking to reach further into the schools to foster an IT mentality. It is a participant in Wichita’s STEMpact2020 coalition that won a share in a $1 million private grant to encourage teens’ interest in science, technology, math and engineering professions.

As part of its recent growth in Wichita, the company has also created a kind of super-customer support center where staff members provide answers to NetApp’s business customers calling in with technical questions. For this work, the company is seeking employees with a more general knowledge of computers and how companies use them.

“For the general business function, we got a group of people with strong program management, technical and community background,” he said. “So, for our support organization, there is a lot of IT talent in Wichita because of the number of large corporations there.”

Reich said that having a base of trained talent available is critical to growing an IT economy.

“Silicon Valley 30 years ago was all defense (military contract work); there was no Google or Facebook,” he said. “I think having all that technical talent around can’t help but eventually lead to a diversified economy.”

Growing your own

Jonathan George is one of Wichita’s more prominent tech entrepreneurs. He developed one company, Boxcar, and sold it. He crashed and burned with another one, Evomail, a year ago. He is now working on a new company, splitting his time between his home in Wichita and San Francisco.

He sees Wichita not as transforming its economy but as evolving.

“It’s a 20-year thing,” George said. “It will be never be anything close to Silicon Valley, but it doesn’t need to be. There are plenty of advantages already here that we can build on.”

Some of those strengths are manufacturing and the knowledge of how to franchise. New entrepreneurs could add to the ranks of Wichita technology companies, such as High Touch and InfoSync, that got their start serving those industries.

“We need to lean into those things we do best,” he said.

To generate those new entrepreneurs and new companies, he is helping to set up something new in Wichita: a privately funded and managed entrepreneur accelerator.

It’s a well-established concept, modeled on Y Combinator or Techstars, found in cities around the world, he said.

In an accelerator, an entrepreneur is invited for two to four months of intensive mentoring and advising. He or she will learn how to really build a project, how to determine whether the business model works and how to operate. The entrepreneur also receives seed money in return for a stake in the company. Entrepreneurs will pass through the accelerator in small groups so they can share experiences and learning.

“When they get out, they should have a real product and a fundable company that can be put in front of their investors and the public,” he said.

The accelerator would be based downtown, he said.

The accelerator’s backers, he said, hope to raise $2 million to $3 million from private investors to get the program going by the end of 2015.

e2e Fund

Developer Gary Oborny is big on entrepreneurship and co-chairs the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s entrepreneurial task force.

Developing the city’s tech sector is very doable, he said.

He and some investors are putting together a venture capital fund, the e2e Fund, for companies that provide some benefit to Wichita. It is aimed not at start-ups but at businesses that are looking to scale up.

Oborny said the fund’s backers are working with a company that would move from another state. It would start operating in Wichita with three to five jobs and would be expected to hit 30 to 35 jobs by the third year. He hopes to be able to announce the first company in March.

He said the immediate fundrasing target is $2 million.

“This is not a charity, but the returns are very manageable, and we don’t look to take heavy control,” Oborny said.

This story was originally published February 27, 2015 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Wichita is stepping up its tech game."