By Galen Moore
Courtesy of Mass High Tech
When anyone’s job could be the next one cut, it might seem an inopportune time to ask if you can work from home. But if you work in software, your boss might view it as a favor to the firm.
At IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), 42 percent of employees don’t have a “desk,” per se. That is, they don’t report regularly to an office. According to the company — which is Massachusetts’ second-largest employer in software development — that saves Big Blue $100 million a year on real estate.
The state’s largest software employer, Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), is also mobilizing its work force — but the endeavor is relatively new, a spokesman said.
Large and small companies are seeing the benefits to a dispersed work force. It allows companies to mobilize resources more flexibly and to focus their precious capital on product development rather than operations.
“When we started in 1999, it was not the norm. But now it’s the mainstream case (among software developers),” said Andy Singleton, founder of Assembla LLC. With 16 employees, but only two based at its Needham office, the company makes software development platforms with tools designed to help dispersed employees work together. “If you go and you ask somebody who has a software team and you say ‘Are these people in your office,’ only 25 percent of them will say yes,” he said.
Sonian Inc. started its cloud-based data archiving service in 2007. The startup now has 10 employees and calls itself a Dedham-based company — but in reality, Sonian has no full-time office space. Instead, the company rents office time on demand when it needs to schedule meetings with potential clients, investors or business partners.
“We wanted to be capital efficient with our seed round,” said co-founder and CTO Greg Arnette. “There was no reason that the business needed to establish a physical office in the beginning.”
Sonian is near to closing a Series A funding round, which Arnette valued at less than $5 million. He said with those funds, the company will establish a physical office in the Boston area and hire about seven new employees. But for now, the virtual office model has had its benefits, he said — by forcing the team to maximize meeting time and communicate well in the written medium.
“As you go along, you’re kind of documenting what’s happening in the company,” he said. “It’s all getting recorded electronically — more so than having a lot of meetings around the conference room.”
Face time still has its adherents. Many agile-method software developers say it’s essential to their iterative approach to coding. Developers at The MathWorks Inc. also believe that 80 percent of success is showing up. The culture at Massachusetts’ fifth-largest software employer emphasizes the importance of sharing physical work space — so much so that the MathWorks is constructing a new four-story building on its Natick campus.
“A philosophy of the company is, you really need to be here to have those interactions and face-to-face conversations with people — whether at the water cooler, in a meeting or passing in the hall,” said MathWorks spokesman David Smith.
If that were the philosophy at IBM, Dean Marsh said he’d find it hard to do his job. Marsh manages 900 developers worldwide, who work with customers pre- and post-sales on the company’s Tivoli software portfolio. A typical day starts at 6 a.m. with colleagues in Japan, Beijing or Kuala Lumpur, then passes through Europe, the East Coast and the West Coast. By the time the day is over, at 8 p.m., he’s back in Asia again.
Marsh does all this from his home office, where he can break up his workday with time for his family. A commute would be impossible, he said. “If you can imagine having a schedule that goes from 6 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., having to go into an office would (mean) tremendous strain.”
With 60 labs worldwide, IBM has had to learn to work across geography, Marsh said. As a result, when Marsh switched from the Cambridge-centric Lotus division to the company’s Tivoli unit, focused around Austin, Texas, he didn’t have to move.
“There’s really no such thing as a headquarters anymore,” he said. “If you had to really find the headquarters of any of our divisions, you’d be hard-pressed to do that.”
