Another SD firm moving to Texas

Omnitracs, a software firm that manages applications for the trucking industry, will relocate its headquarters from San Diego to Dallas thanks in part to a $3.9 million check from the Texas government.

The move, announced Friday, completes the exodus of three local companies acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners. Earlier this month, Texas announced that Active Network would also be moving to Dallas, while Websense in February announced it would relocate to Austin.

In exchange for the $3.9 million, Omnitracs will create 450 jobs and make a $10 million capital investment. The company, which Vista Equity acquired from Qualcomm last year, had been an early success story but in recent years had struggled. While it only accounted for a small part of Qualcomm’s $25 billion in sales in 2012, its revenues at one time helped fund development of the company’s core CDMA technology. Last year, though, its sales growth had flattened.

Omnitracs CEO John Graham said he was excited about the move to Dallas.

“Establishing Dallas as our new headquarters will further solidify our industry leadership position, allowing us to centralize operations and better serve our growing multi-national customer base,” Graham said. “As a major transportation hub with a technology-savvy workforce, we believe Dallas offers great advantages that align with our long-term business vision. Our new headquarters location places us closer to many of our fleet customers to ensure we can quickly and efficiently meet their evolving mobile technology needs.”

In an emailed statement, Omnitracs said that while it expects that many of its existing employees will relocate to the new headquarters, “we also expect to retain a meaningful presence in San Diego. The Omnitracs headquarters relocation is a fairly fluid process and it will take 6-12 months to determine the final staffing levels in each office location.”

The company currently has 300 employees based in San Diego.

In all, Vista Equities, which has a history of moving companies out of California, is getting $17 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund to move the three companies out of San Diego.

“Employers of all sizes and from all industries know that Texas’ model of low taxes, smart regulations, fair courts and skilled workforce provide the best chance for their success now and well into the future,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement. “Omnitracs is the latest employer to call Dallas home, creating hundreds of jobs in the area and pumping millions in capital into the local economy.”

The recently announced moves of the Vista Equity companies wrongly suggest that there is a growing movement by business to leave California for more economically hospitable states, says Don Walls, president of Walls and Associates, a Denver-based database research firm that has tracked the movements of companies nationwide since 1989.

While his database is currently only through 2011, Walls said he expects that the number of jobs leaving California still represents a very small fraction of the net movement out of the state. In San Diego alone, he said, there were roughly 550,000 jobs that moved somewhere between 1990 and 2011, but 512,000 of those made their moves within the same metro area, he pointed out.

“The vast majority of California firms that move out move to somewhere else in California and if someone needs really cheap labor or land, it’s likely California is no longer an optimal location because California has never been about cheap land, cheap labor, or cheap energy,” Walls said. “While we’d all like to believe it’s different today than it was yesterday, it isn’t. There’s more press because Gov. Perry would like you to believe he’s making a difference but he is not making a blip in the data through 2011.”

Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Business and Economic Development declined comment.

San Diego did recently receive a bit of good news in the jobs department earlier this week when genome sequencing giant Illumina announced it will enlarge its local manufacturing operations, which will enable the city’s largest biotech company to eventually add about 300 employees to its local payroll of about 1,500.

In return, Illumina will get a rebate of up to a total of $1.5 million in sales taxes it would otherwise have to pay as it grows.

While the loss of Omnitracs and the other Vista Equities companies is a blow to San Diego, the planned move is less about San Diego’s economic climate and more about Vista’s business practices, said Mark Cafferty, head of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Council.

“Texas is celebrating quite strongly their ability to attract companies from California. but ultimately what we’re realizing is the loss of these companies is not a San Diego story,” he said. “They were purchased by an equity firm whose business model is to move companies to where there are cost savings to them.

“It’s unfortunate for us, but ultimately we’ll see that the most talented people will stay behind because they want to make San Diego their home and contribute to the economy by likely creating new businesses.”