Carolina On Its Mind: CompuCom To Move Corporate Headquarters From Texas to South Carolina

CompuCom plans to relocate its corporate headquarters from the Dallas area to South Carolina, creating 1,500 corporate and contact center jobs in the Charlotte, N.C. suburbs.

The Plano, Texas-based company said the move to Indian Land, S.C. will bring its product and service development teams together in one location, allowing them to work more closely with one another and with CompuCom's senior leadership. CompuCom's contact center employees are currently spread across Texas; Louisville, Ky.; and Charlotte, the company said.

CompuCom employs 11,500, meaning South Carolina would be home to roughly 13 percent of its workforce five to seven years from now once the jobs make their way to the Palmetto State. The South Carolina hires will mostly be in newly-created roles across the field technician, service desk personnel and functional role support domains, said Jonathan James, CompuCom's chief marketing officer.

[RELATED: CompuCom Promotes EVP Dan Stone to CEO]

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

The company said the move would place the $1.9 billion systems integrator closer to many of its clients and near a cluster of startups, high-tech businesses and growing network of IT workers. Specifically, the Charlotte area is home to many of the retail, financial services, healthcare and insurance companies that CompuCom counts among its clientele, James said.

The announcement comes just a week after CompuCom promoted Dan Stone - previously the leader of its end-user enablement division - to CEO. Before joining CompuCom, Stone had spent eight years as an executive at Lenovo, which has its U.S. headquarters near Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

CompuCom has gradually been building up its presence in the Carolinas over the past 20 months, and today has roughly 100 employees working in a temporary office in Charlotte, James said.

Today, James said CompuCom's executive chairman, CFO, chief of strategy, leaders of its end-user enablement and service experience management business units – along with Stone and James himself – all work out of Charlotte. As this cluster strengthened, James said CompuCom began concentrating on the Carolinas when it was backfilling vacancies or adding net new positions to the company.

"Ultimately, the plans were to locate and move to a more permanent office structure," James said. "This kind of signifies the next steps in our journey."

CompuCom began conversations well over a year ago with the Commerce Departments in both North Carolina and South Carolina about possible homes for a new corporate headquarters, James said, ultimately ending up just 10 minutes from its current Charlotte office, despite being in a different state.

"South Carolina is very aggressive in attracting new business and new jobs," James said. "You get lots of the benefits of the proximity to Charlotte, and yet you're just over the border."

South Carolina's Coordinating Council for Economic Development approved job credits for CompuCom, which James said the company will be eligible for as it hires and brings jobs to the new facility. CompuCom's relocation is the largest single job announcement in the history of 86,000-person Lancaster County, S.C.

The Dallas area, though, will remain home to a couple hundred CompuCom's jobs, its cloud technology group and network operations center (NOC), and the company's chief legal counsel and head of its cloud technology services group, James said. CompuCom recently signed a seven-year lease for its Plano site, James said, and no company employees will be required to relocate from Texas to South Carolina.

"We're not leaving Texas," James said. "It's still a strong part of the hub, and we're not going to be moving any new jobs from Texas."

South Carolina will also serve as home to CompuCom's Tech-Zone Service Centers operation, which provides walk-up IT services to franchise holders and small- and medium-sized businesses. Work on CompuCom's new home is currently underway and should be complete in roughly a year, James said.

CompuCom will lease a 150,000 square foot building in the Bailes Ridge Business Park, which will use the company's Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to connect, automate and control all of the building's electronic devices and systems. The building's HVAC, lighting, elevators, water, power, communications, TVs, security, fitness equipment and kitchen electronics will all be controlled by IoT, the company said.

"We've got some pretty cool, next-generation IoT solutions we can showcase in the building itself," James said. "It's always much more powerful when we can say to a client, 'Hey, we've done this.'"

IT distributors have established an extensive footprint in the Carolina in recent decades, with Greenville, S.C. serving as both ScanSource's corporate headquarters and the headquarters for Synnex's U.S. distribution practice.

But the Carolinas are not home to many large solution providers – the largest reseller in the region today is Pawleys Island, S.C.-based Mercom, which reached $150 million in annual sales in 2014. In contrast, Texas is home to six solution providers other than CompuCom that rake in more than $150 million of revenue each year.

"It's much easier to grab awareness in terms of reaching out to prospective customers and prospective employees in a less crowded field," James said. "From a marketing perspective, I love it."

A strong university system and ecosystem of corporate partners have made both Charlotte and Dallas good places for finding IT talent, James said. A good quality of life and low cost of living have resulted in many qualified employees moving from higher-cost areas such as New York, Boston, San Francisco or Los Angeles to Sun Belt cities such as Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Charleston and Atlanta, James said.

"I think the whole Southeast and Southwest is emerging as a go-to place [for IT workers]," James said.