Oregon’s Rogue Valley Tries to Lure Software Firms Like Trilobyte : Technology: Former Irvine developer of popular CD-ROM game ‘The 7th Guest’ made the move north two years ago.

MEDFORD, Ore. — The big cities can fight it out with tax breaks and sewer hookups to seduce the big computer hardware manufacturing plants.

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Business lawyer Rich Berman doesn’t care.

He’s more interested in small new software outfits who’s staff can load their PCs in the trunk of a car and go looking for a nice place to raise their children.

He already has watched one of his clients, Trilobyte Inc., move from Irvine and grow from just four employees to 50 in the past two years while producing the hit CD-ROM game, “The 7th Guest.”

That happened without any help from the local economic development folks. What if they really tried to sell the Rogue Valley, a rural region best known for steelhead fishing, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, timber and pears?

Armed with an ad in a computer magazine and a home page on the World Wide Web, Berman and friends from the southern Oregon chapter of the Software Assn. of Oregon launched a campaign last week to recruit software companies to their region.

“I believe we are the first region in the country to go out and make a concerted attempt to try to recruit software developers,” said Charles McHenry, a public relations consultant specializing in high-tech companies.

They are not alone in seeing the potential. Regions centered in Eugene, Bend and Mount Hood also have identified software as a key industry for strategic economic planning.

It won’t take long for other areas to realize they can pitch an industry that already pumps $1.5 billion into Oregon’s economy for a lot less than the millions of dollars in tax breaks that have become standard in wooing big computer hardware factories. The Rogue Valley campaign cost just $30,000, most of it donated services.

Most of the 1,300 software companies in Oregon have fewer than 10 employees, but the industry pays the highest wages in the state--twice the state average at $45,000 a year in 1993, said Sandy Hogan, executive director of the Software Assn. of Oregon in Beaverton.

And it’s a field that’s expanding.

“What you are seeing with a lot of reorganizing, downsizing and business transformation, you have the movement of a lot of people who were thinking in terms of one company for life now thinking in terms of starting their own businesses, creating their own companies, or at the very least being consultants,” said Bob Cohen, vice president of the Information Technology Assn. of America.

The Rogue Valley wasn’t always big on software. When Berman raised the idea with the local economic development agency a few years ago, he didn’t get a call back. Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc. was busy boosting tourism to make up for the timber jobs lost to a soft housing market and environmental concerns on the national forests.

But this time around, Berman not only got a call back, he also received $10,000 to help finance the campaign.

The magazine ad targets people who want to get out of the Silicon Snarl.

“Got a life?” asks the headline.

Rather than a phone or postal address, McHenry said, the ad provides readers with an Internet site: https://www.opendoor.com/oregon.

“The presumption, which I think is accurate here, is that almost everybody who is a software developer is on the Internet,” he said.

With the target just a few keystrokes away, why weren’t they doing this before?

“It’s probably been because of the idea that software developers had to locate where the companies they are supporting are,” such as the “silicon forests” around Seattle and Portland, Ore., said Gordon Safley, operations manager for SO-REDI. “We’re seeing that is not true.”

When they looked around, they realized 75 software companies were already in the Rogue Valley, providing programming for everything from methadone clinics to CD-ROM games. And it’s getting easier to do software here. Fiber optic telephone service, which expands Internet access, is now available. So are the kinds of specialized legal services Berman provides.

With the Internet, location isn’t nearly so important as it once was, said Alan Oppenheimer, a refugee from Cupertino, Calif., where he was a software engineer for Apple. He and his wife, Priscilla, founded Open Door Networks in their home in Ashland. They help people and corporations build their own Web pages and post them on their network.

“The only difference is the Bay Area is still the hotbed of all the technology. That gives it some slight geographic advantage,” Oppenheimer said.

Graeme Devine, CEO and co-founder of Trilobyte, bailed out of Irvine to establish his multimedia company in southern Oregon. He would much rather raise his 2-year-old daughter in Jacksonville, a gold rush town of 2,000 surrounded by pear orchards, than the freeway crush of Southern California.

And the cost of doing business here is much lower than in California, whether it’s film talent or office space, he added.

Both Devine and Oppenheimer are donating in-kind services to the recruitment campaign because they want more software outfits around them.

“Expanding the base of software operations in this area makes it easier for Trilobyte to attract the expertise to the area we need to attract,” Devine said. “I always dreamed of owning 80 acres with a view. But typically, the problem is with the young programmers who still like the big city. They need to see there is more up here happening than just Trilobyte.”