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M/SUNNY Temp: 68 °F Wind: N at 3 mph Friday, May 2, 2003 SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map EXTRA HomeLife Magazine W3 Magazine Jobs @ Mail Tribune Tempo A & E Oregon CarZone Wellness Connection Real Estate Newspaper in Education Prime Times Outdoor Journal Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People CLASSIFIEDS Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Find Everything E SOUTHERN OREGON Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar ABOUT US FAQ What's New Advertise Home Delivery Classified Ad Contact Us Media Kit Email Story to a Friend April 21, 2003 Adam Giandomenico is president of Lighthouse Worldwide Solutions, a high technology firm that will manufacture particle-counting machines in Medford. The company�s arrival will mean 80 to 100 new jobs. Mail Tribune / Jim Craven Device-maker moves in By GREG STILES Mail Tribune A Silicon Valley technology firm is shifting its manufacturing operations to Medford, creating 80 to 100 new jobs here over the next 18 months. Lighthouse Worldwide Solutions of Milpitas, Calif., is setting up shop at the 8,930-square-foot former Viatech International Enterprises location on Disk Drive in west Medford. Production of the company’s particle counters that range in price from $4,000 to $20,000 is scheduled to begin the first week of May. "That’s good news for the area," says Guy Tauer, a regional economist for the state employment department. "Over the past few years, we’ve seen a downturn in instrument- related and electronic-related manufacturing. Manufacturing has been down both statewide and nationally for 31 months in a row. It’s good to see a little bounce-back in that sector." Lighthouse designs, installs and maintains particle counters used in contamination monitoring systems throughout the world. Its customers include Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Prudential, Raytheon, Seagate and Western Digital. President Adam Giandomenico, a member of the firm’s six-person board, has been overseeing the move, and several of the new hires have been training at Lighthouse’s headquarters just north of San Jose, Calif. The facility will provide worldwide technical support and training, and it will manage call centers and tech support posts in Singapore, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia. Lighthouse chose Medford over cities in Montana, Nevada and Arizona. "The main thing was transportation," Giandomenico says. "We wanted to make sure we could move both product and people. This area really won hands down. The fantastic thing about the area is that it offers other activities these people can participate in." The company’s first help-wanted ad produced 200 resumes, and by Thursday, 20 people had been hired. "There is a large pool of highly skilled manufacturing people here in the Rogue Valley, Giandomenico says. "And the facility is five-and-a-half hours from our headquarters, which means it’s extremely convenient. There is a fantastic local airport that just increased its flights, and overall, it’s a very enjoyable environment for people to live in." Lighthouse’s presence is expected to directly and indirectly inject between $11 million and $16 million annually into the local economy. "It’s a drop in the bucket of a $2.2 billion local economy, but it’s a drop in the right direction," says Bruce Laird, a regional development officer with the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department. "Traded sector companies such as Lighthouse produce locally, sell outside the trade area and bring income into the area. They consume services and create demand for more such services." Giandomenico estimates between 300 and 500 customers and agents from Europe, Asia, South America and the United States will visit the site annually. Growth in demand for air service, broadband communications and vendor services, says Laird, paves the way for other companies to follow. "Contrast that with certain retailers that import goods, sell locally and move the proceeds outside the area," Laird says. Lighthouse’s roots go back to 1982, when Korean native Tae Yun Kim, 57, founder and chief executive officer of the company, began making video games for Commodore 64 home computer systems in Vermont. Three years later, the firm moved to the Silicon Valley, doing contract software engineering for other companies. When a company such as Intuit wanted to produce a new Quicken product, it would hire Lighthouse to do the software quality assurance. The first contract Lighthouse landed after moving west was with Chicago-based FMC Corp., maker of the Bradley remote-control armored vehicle. "We were like the last resort; companies would call us when they really couldn’t solve their issues with their direct engineering team," Giandomenico says. But it wasn’t until Komag Inc., the largest independent supplier of disk-drive media, came to Lighthouse with a different kind of problem that it began manufacturing its own products. "They had four clean rooms in California, two in Malaysia and one in Japan," Giandomenico says. "They wanted to tie all these facilities together and have one real-time monitoring system in one location. If you think about what the challenge was back then — we were dealing with 1,200 to 2,400 baud modems, DOS was the main operating system people were using. People really didn’t know what Windows was. In 1989 and 1990, choosing Windows was a pretty big risk." Clean rooms are typically housed inside 100,000-square-foot buildings and occupy 10,000 square feet. "You are talking about a thousand sensors per facility, a thousand instruments per facility and all of those instruments speaking back to the system every second," Giandomenico says. "It was a massive undertaking. We had 30 engineers on the project." The company took the contract with an option to market and sell the product as its own. That meant hiring a sales and manufacturing force, nearly doubling the staff. With the majority of customers in Asia, Lighthouse built offices overseas and hired locally. "We grew from a company that provided monitoring systems to being a company that became experts in contamination control," Giandomenico says. He says the company predicates its success on the worth of everyone involved. "Try to identify the least important spoke in a bicycle wheel," he says. "You can’t. They are all of equal value." For more, go to www.golighthouse.com . The company may be reached at 770-5905. Reach reporter Greg Stiles at 776-4463 or e-mail [email protected] . 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