As HQ moves to Boston, SevOne unveils new 50K-square-foot Newark office

Would you rather have the jobs or the leadership?

There was a strange pairing of announcements that came last week from SevOne, one of Delaware’s proudest tech business success stories.
First, SevOne leadership confirmed they had officially moved their corporate headquarters to Boston, as the News Journal first reported. SevOne cofounders Vess and Tanya Bakalov, Bulgarian immigrants who have grown their network infrastructure monitoring company to more than 500 employees, have themselves bought a second home there.
“Whether our headquarters is in Boston or our headquarters is in Delaware, it really doesn’t matter because we’re a global company,” CEO Jack Sweeney told the News Journal. “The company is still incorporated in Delaware.”
Then last week, SevOne formally unveiled its new 50,000-square-foot, two-floor facility at the University of Delaware STAR Campus in Newark, a move that was first championed last December as a sign of that expanding innovation campus. The location is also meant to develop a firmer pipeline between UD graduates and SevOne, Gov. Jack Markell said, curbing encroaching brain drain.
Nearly half of the company’s 500 employees are based in Delaware and company leadership says that won’t change, though decision makers may spend more time in brainy Boston. (It was, indeed, a big week: SevOne team members were also on hand to accept their Tech Business of the Year Delaware Innovation Award on Friday.)

The snazzy facility, complete with a 35-foot spiral slide, marks the company’s growth from its four-person start in 2005 on Newark’s Main Street. The Markell administration downplayed the importance of SevOne leadership’s move, noting that jobs were what mattered most. CEO Sweeney, along with other C-level company executives live in Massachusetts, according to the News Journal.
Developing a 230-person-strong workforce at a facility with a 13-year lease is a kind of permanence, but there’s a civic pride to hosting the headquarters, not to mention the inertia of leadership decisions. No doubt the decision sours for Markell otherwise positively splendid growth news.

Congratulations to @SevOneInc & we wish you the best of luck. @DEDOgov #netDE pic.twitter.com/JtkkLFhiZG

— Gov. Jack Markell (@GovernorMarkell) November 19, 2015