James November-December 2024 web - Flipbook - Page 9
The Georgia Institute of Technology
has been one of the country’s top engineering schools for decades, maybe
a century. U.S. News and World Report
ranked it fourth in its most recent
rankings, behind only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford
and UC Berkeley. Not only is it ranked
highly, but it is also churning out
more engineering graduates than any
school in the country. It’s a neck and
neck race with Purdue but Georgia
Tech graduates somewhere around
3,400 engineers every year. UC Berkeley has 1,000 less.
For Georgia’s exploding tech sector,
there are few single statistics that mean
more. And in Georgia Tech’s case, a
huge number of graduates stay in Atlanta to find work. Without a whole lot
of effort, economic developers and companies looking to recruit and ensure a
specialized workforce find easy pickings from the Ramblin’ Wreck grads.
TAG HELPING TO LEAD THE WAY
The Technology Association of
Georgia (TAG) was founded in 1999,
thanks to the merger of three of the
state’s largest technology organizations: the Southeastern Software
Association, the Business and Technology Alliance and Women in Technology. Overnight, TAG became one
of the largest technology associations
in the country. With more than 30,000
members across the state and more
than 150 events, if your company or
employment is at all related to the
tech sector then chances are you’ve
had an interaction with TAG.
TAG is led by Larry Williams, a
career economic developer who was
formerly the CEO of the Miami-Dade
County economic development partnership— The Beacon Council— and also
was the vice president for technology
development at the Metro Atlanta
Chamber. Before that, Williams was
the director of international trade and
economic development in Seattle. So he
has had a front row seat to the maneuverings of tech companies around the
country for the last 30 years. As the
leader of TAG, no one is more plugged
into the tech sector in Georgia than
Williams. And talking with him is like
opening the encyclopedia of the sector.
Atlanta has been home to various
big tech companies going back to the
1980s. Dennis Hayes was a Georgia
Tech grad, who along with fellow
Atlantan Dale Heatherington, invented
one of the first modems. “If you’re old
enough to know when we set a telephone on a cradle so that it could talk
to other computers and play games or
communicate, that was built right here
in metro Atlanta and became a global
industry from there,” Williams says.
Scientific Atlanta was also a huge
organization driving global innovation
and was eventually bought by Cisco.
Check processing was also huge. “Atlanta was the center of check processing. We could do it better, faster. Part
of it was a manual process, but also
part of it became automated,” Williams
notes. “And as we advanced, we actually were part of the whole process
of leading the digitization of check
processing, which has now become
the fintech industry.”
NCR, Synovus and Fiserv, to name
a few, are enormous fintech companies
either based in Atlanta or with significant operations there. There are 300
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