Selling our brainpower: from cattle tags to LaserTweezers - New Mexico's high technology industry - includes related article - Cover Story

New Mexico Business Journal, August, 1992 by Reed Upton

Cover story: New Mexico's best and brightest talk high tech

Henry Edward Roberts, with a couple of partners, began a firm named Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems in a rented house on San Mateo Boulevard in Albuquerque in 1972.

From that firm grew what has arguably become the most dynamic instrument of change in the modern business world since the invention of the typewriter: the personal computer.

But before New Mexico could reap the fruits of this home-grown high technology, Micro Telemetry had been sold and moved out of state.

At about the same time as Micro Telemetry Systems' start-up, a young Harvard dropout was in Albuquerque writing software.

Today, that man's company is based in the small burgh of Redmond, Wash., just west of Seattle, and led the software industry in sales during 1991 with gross revenues of $2.27 billion.

Some of New Mexico's best and brightest in high tech talk about the industry from within and what needs to happen in the future.

Among the products that William H. Gates III's firm pioneered? MS-DOS, which is the operating language for virtually all IBM and IBM compatible personal computers, and his company's newest gambit to shape the emerging personal-computer environment, Windows.

The name of Gates' outfit? Microsoft, Inc.

While the stories of Roberts and Gates may become part of the New Mexico mythos of those that got away, many other high technology firms are today being spawned throughout the state, many of which say they intend to stay -- despite some obstacles.

"This is as bright a place as any place you can find in the country," says George Friberg, president and chief executive officer of Tetra Corp., a closely held Albuquerque corporation specializing in pulsed power applications and services in electrical engineering and physics. "We have a hotbed of activity in research and development. We could grow up just like Route 128 (near Boston) or Silicon Valley."

Tetra is Friberg's second foray into the high-tech private sector; his first start from the gate saw Gulton Industries grow from 20 employees to roughly 400.

In Tetra, Friberg sees the firm moving more from basic research into the developmental arena all the time.

"We've already commercialized one product -- a computer software code for analyzing electric fields," he says. "We've sold patent rights to another technology we did for the Department of Energy that dealt with pulsed power technology in drilling."

"We currently have three technologies that we think are pretty good candidates for commercialization."

One of the problems, though, in transforming developing technologies into marketable services and products is the research and development lead time, which, according to Friberg, can give capital sources the heebie jeebies.

There's a gap in money and time between a pure R&D play and the commercialization of a product.

Investment capital -- banking for the most part -- is very risk-averse to the R&D community. They don't understand investments in research because research is very risky. They'd like to see everything yield a product.

Another change Friberg would like to see is more commitment from state government to growing New Mexico's high-tech industries.

"We really need the state to rethink the use of a research and development agency at the state level," he says. "We're a state that prides itself on research and development, but we don't have that kind of initiative at the state level."

Bob McPherson, president of the Rio Grande Technology Foundation, or Riotech, concurs with Friberg. New Mexico does have the potential for developing into another Route 128 or Silicon Valley, but not without some leadership.

"Those things (Route 128 and Silicon Valley) are built around some industry," says McPherson. "Could we develop that here? Absolutely. Will we? Not unless we change our ways.

"We need to have an aggressive, state-sponsored plan, a combination of business and state government, that actively seeks to establish New Mexico as the center of something."

Riotech is a not-for-profit corporation originally founded to utilize the technical resources of the state to benefit New Mexico through economic development.

Currently, Riotech's thrust is in the development of environmentally conscious manufacturing technology, aided by a $3 million grant from the federal government.

"We need an active program that builds what's already here and attracts new industry that is clean," says McPherson. "One of the problems is that we have, by and large, an industry that is primarily slave cylinders -- manufacturing here, corporate headquarters elsewhere."

An example of McPherson's "slave cylinder" concept had its roots, ironically, in Los Angeles before the firm was bought out and corporate headquarters moved to Dallas.

But Amtech Systems Corp. still maintains a strong presence in New Mexico -- 113 full time and 25 temporary employees -- through its Technology and Manufacturing Division.

"The company has its roots in Los Alamos (National Laboratory)," says division vice president for finance Dennis Wilson. "That's where a project was carried on for about 12 years dealing with the identification of livestock for disease control."