Microsoft Boise can't find enough local engineers

Bob Lokken is senior director of sales and business development at Microsoft Boise. Microsoft opened its first office in Idaho this fall after purchasing ProClarity, the software company Lokken founded. The Boise division of Microsoft designs business intelligence software.

What does ProClarity do?

ProClarity the company doesn’t exist anymore. The software helps people analyze data. It’s a subset of business intelligence, called analysis software. A business collects data, our software helps visualize it. It’s like surfing the Internet.

Why did you decide to start the company?

We looked at the fact that the data companies collect had exploded — doubling every 14 to 18 months now. The primary tools people used to analyze data hadn’t changed in 40 years. Most decision makers didn’t have the tools to look at data and get information from it. It’s easy in a spreadsheet, but harder in terabytes.

Did you ever imagine the company you started would bring Microsoft to Boise?

It certainly wasn’t a goal we set. We set out to solve problems for customers. The market started to grow, and started to be dominated by bigger companies. Microsoft was one company interested in us. Our customers saw it as a natural merger — they thought it was about time.

Business is going quite well since acquisition. As a small company, we expected a few hundred new customers a month. Now we get a few hundred a week.

Microsoft Boise is about 100 people. HP was about 70 people when it started here. I hope we can drive Microsoft’s growth in Boise. It could have a major impact on the valley and the state.

What are Microsoft’s plans for expanding in Boise?

We have a few job openings. The rest of the team lives in Redmond. Our goal this year was to integrate the teams. We will address growth plans next summer. It’s been hard to find people in Boise with the skills and background we need.

Why is it difficult to find people here?

Most tech in the valley is hardware — chips and printers. We’re a software company. We need software engineers. And business leaders with software experience.

Enrollment in high-tech degrees is declining. Enrollment in science and math is declining. Kids are afraid of math and science. The school systems haven’t been enforcing rigor. It takes a year and a half of remedial study [to bring students up to speed], and makes college five or six years long. What [Boise State University President Bob] Kustra is doing is great, but I don’t know that he’s getting a steady flow of motivated students with math and science skills.

At the rate tech jobs are being outsourced, isn’t there a perception that a computer science career is no longer a good investment?

It used to be only low wage, low skill jobs were outsourced. Now we’re competing with India and China. The standard of living is lower, but the job skill isn’t. Are we going to compete with that or just let jobs go overseas? A lot of people in rural Idaho can’t relate. But it’s happening. Microsoft’s Redmond campus has talent from around the world, including Russia and China. But they moved here to work. They pay local taxes.

It’s one thing to give up on low-paying jobs. But it scares me to hear people give up on high-paying jobs. We’re transitioning to the information age, where a higher number of jobs are in information technology. Agriculture and manufacturing is shrinking, and our ability to compete is information based.

Right now we’re having a public debate about raising our school systems to a level where they’re mediocre nationally. They should be the best. Instead we’re catching up to Kentucky and Mississippi. It’s hard to imagine high-tech companies thriving here if they have to hire out of state or overseas.

People don’t understand that tech pays the bulk of taxes in this state. If you own a farm, it stays here. Software companies are portable. We could relocate in 30 days. There’s no real estate holding us here, no natural resource needs. ProClarity was asked to move a dozen times when we were looking for investors. It’s not wise to take tech companies for granted.

Are you having difficulty convincing Microsoft to grow here?

At this point there’s no commitment that Microsoft will grow in Boise. I think the primary issue will be how big the local labor pool is and attracting new engineers here. If they don’t like the school system or lifestyle, they won’t move. If it takes two years to hire 200 people here, and it can be done in two months in Seattle…

If we’re going to grow here, we need to find a workforce to do it. Without them, we can’t grow the business. We have three highly paid positions we’ve been trying to fill for nine months. We’re interviewing in Seattle now. We’re still going to try to bring Microsoft jobs to Idaho, but this just makes it harder.

What is ProClarity contributing to Microsoft’s current and upcoming business software?

ProClarity is providing the analytics portion of Microsoft’s upcoming Performance Point platform. People who use Microsoft BI will see ProClarity as a key piece of that.

Office itself will get smarter about using BI. They’re adding database capabilities, but it’s very complicated right now. It requires three pieces of software: an SQL data platform and analytics software that sit on top of it. Those metrics get surfaced in Excel. The harder part is importing the data for analysis.

Microsoft sees this area, the business intelligence segment that Microsoft Boise is a part of, as huge growth potential.