Information Technology and Software

Albuquerque’s vibrant information technology and software industry is one of the biggest clusters at more than 300 companies in the metro area.

This segment includes computers, software, telecommunications products and service, the Internet and online services.

Some of the bigger players are QinetiQ North America (formerly Apogen Technologies) , and software developer Thomson Elite, which entered Albuquerque with the acquisition of Albuquerque-based ProLaw and recently expanded.

Most of the city’s IT firms are small and highly entrepreneurial. And a number of big operations, such as Intel, Honeywell and Northrop Grumman have sizable populations of IT workers within their local plants.

Albuquerque’s IT strengths include: cluster supercomputers, informatics, data mining, graphics animation and visualization, geospatial information, environmental software, educational technologies, multi-media, Internet technologies, cyber-security and encryption and networking technologies.

What IT Companies Say

Chris Poole, president and CEO of Thomson Elite: “Thomson Elite is committing to the city of Albuquerque through its investment in a new facility, job creation and associated benefits to the community. The support of local government was essential to Thomson's decision to grow the business in Albuquerque.”

Greg Miller, co-founder and COO of SAMBA Holdings Corp.: “You can recruit great talent here. When you’re coming from California or Boston, these prices look extremely affordable. And there’s a lot of entrepreneurial people here.”

IT Assets

The Center for High Performance Computing at the University of New Mexico serves the university’s academic research and supports the Computational Science and Engineering program. See http://www.hpc.unm.edu/ .

Sandia National Laboratories has been a leader in virtually every aspect of hardware and software development. It’s probably best known in the computer world for massively parallel computing -- linking large numbers of desktop computers and getting them to work together.

Workforce Training

The Academy of Advanced Technology is a four-year program at Albuquerque High School intended to create career pathways to Central New Mexico Community College (CNM), UNM and jobs in IT. TVI offers a large number of IT classes, and the Department of Computer Science at UNM has offered advanced degrees in computer science since 1973.

Contacts

New Mexico Information Technology and Software Association : PO Box 31278, Santa Fe, NM 87594; 505-984-0622

New Mexico Internet Professionals Association : 3900 Paseo del Sol, Santa Fe, NM 87505; 505-424-9585