'Silicon Sunrise' a hub for tech, health care sectors
By Jeff Zbar | South Florida Business Journal | December 3, 2019
Since its founding in 2006, the marketing automation provider has grown to 180 employees nationwide – 80 locally – driving $30 million in annual revenue. Today, the company serves 65 brands and 150,000 users.
As a technology-driven firm, SproutLoud could be based anywhere. But it is fueled in part by a centralized location amid a similarly tech-rich marketplace. Sunrise provides the company access to fellow tech firms and a rich talent pool just a commute away or fresh out of local colleges, CFO David Spinola said.
“With an office full of knowledge workers, access to talent is really important to us,” he said. What’s more, clients and prospects are easily within reach, and business-friendly amenities, restaurants, and hotels have popped up.
“You can sit down and have a business lunch with clients, prospective clients and the partners that we work with,” he said. Sunrise has been “built up with business in mind.”
Looking for a thriving South Florida technology and health care hub? Look west. While cities like Boca Raton or Miami Beach have grabbed headlines for tech innovation, Sunrise has spent the better part of three decades building its technology and health care silos. It has attracted a host of tech and health care firms seeking industry players in an accessible, suburban community.
A short list includes Broadspire, Bolton Medical, SR Technology, Harris Corp., Emerson Electric, Q Interactive, Watson Laboratories and Synergistix. The former Motorola and BlackBerry locations nearby bolstered their tidings. Just like when IBM scaled back and eventually closed its Boca Raton operations, flooding the market with highly skilled technologists who launched the likes of Citrix Systems, the same is happening in western Broward County.
When BlackBerry scaled back, for example, former employees moved to Ford Motor Co. to work on its autonomous vehicle research at Sunrise Corporate Park.
“When Motorola blew out their Plantation division, people came in and capitalized on the employees,” City Manager Richard Salamon said.
In an chicken-and-egg-like quandary, some may wonder what came first – tech, or the infrastructure to serve it. The city’s venerable Sawgrass Technology Park, built in 1985, was sold to Bridge Investment Group for $74.3 million in March. The 11-building office park, spread across 56 acres, boasts major tenants including satellite and Wi-Fi communication tools provider SR Technology, and data science and analytics firm CoreLogic.
Weston-based Ultimate Software recently confirmed it would open a 100,000-square-foot office for 375 employees at the 612-acre Sawgrass International Corporate Park. The news followed the company’s $11 billion acquisition this spring.
A spokeswomen would only comment that “our new building in Sunrise is in addition to our Weston headquarters to support our local growth.”
While office vacancy currently runs around 4%, this critical mass of available space and labor affects both technology and health care. HealthTrust Workforce Solutions could be based anywhere. The wholly owned staffing subsidiary of HCA Healthcare opened 20 years ago down the road from sister facilities Westside Regional Medical Center and Plantation General Hospital, and one county south from JFK Medical Center in Atlantis. In the intervening decades, a health care concentration has grown up around them, CFO Jennifer L. Chemtov said.
“We’ve called it home for more than 20 years and have watched this blossom,” she said. “This health care nexus helps with recruitment. There are people with experience, but we also take new college grads.”
Mednax is headquartered within the Sawgrass International Corporate Park.
COURTESY OF MEDNAX
Like HealthTrust, longtime Sawgrass International Corporate Park tenant Mednax finds proximity to fellow health care businesses aids in recruitment, said Dr. Roger Medel, co-founder and CEO of the national provider of physicians and health care practitioners.
The company spans two buildings in the park: an 80,000-square-foot structure custom-built for the company in 1999, and a 179,000-square-foot building formerly home to tech firm Nortel and acquired by Mednax in 2010.
“Being central to the tri-county area has certainly benefited our business interests,” he said. “The robust health care ecosystem allows us to recruit high-level professionals.”
With vacancy rates in the low single digits in the Sawgrass Park submarket, some companies are staying put and improving their spaces. Along with telecommunications providers T-Mobile and Comcast, AT&T calls the city home. Rather than move to find fresher space, AT&T completed the first phase of a planned $6 million renovation of its existing Sunrise operations earlier this year. When built out and fully staffed, the call center will house 650 agents and managers, said Dana Coleman-Wilkerson, an AT&T area manager.
Teams from the city of Sunrise and economic development agencies collaborated to keep and grow AT&T’s presence. The resulting technology-rich center will include mobile coaching stations and digital whiteboards in meeting rooms; an interactive virtual learning training room that allows for training with other AT&T call centers; and digital recognition walls that display employee anniversaries, birthdays and accomplishments.
Staying in Sunrise allowed the company to keep its employees and continue to lure new recruits from throughout the region, Coleman-Wilkerson said.
“We have a lot of diversity here in South Florida,” she said. “We brought the jobs into the company, and being here helped us retain the jobs.”