High-tech haven on the French Riviera

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France Think of your favourite national or provincial park.

Then figure out how you might fit into that park nearly 1,200 high-tech companies and more than 22,000 employees without destroying the rugged beauty of the place. Add in all the amenities of modern public life, including homes for 7,000 people, good roads, restaurants, schools, a university, 32 tennis courts, a sports centre, endless jogging trails, and three golf courses all tucked unobtrusively within 5,700 acres of the Mimosa pine-clad foothills of the Alpes Maritimes. Then to top it off, add one charming 800-year old town and about 300 days of sunshine a year - and you have the environs that make Sophia Antipolis compelling as a place to both work and play.

"I think we've now reached critical mass," says Gerard Passera, the managing director for SAEM, the park's development authorty.

"I asked one small telecommunications firm of 15 people recently why they came to Sophia.And they told me: 'We can't afford not to be here."'

That's because almost all the major players in a number of high-tech fields are already well ensconced in their lowrise research and development facilities that don't mar the view. Telecommunications firms and organizations head the list. Lucent, AT&T, France Telecom, Alcatel, Cisco Systems to name a few are here as well as ETSI, the European institute for telecommunications standards. The largest Canadian presence in Sophia Antipolis is Nortel Networks. The Brampton, Ont-based Nortel is currently undertaking a 10,000 square-metre expansion of its facilities in the park. Software development took on new prominence In 1999 when SAP AG, the world's largest developer of enterprise software for big business and government, set up its development labs here. Earth sciences and life sciences companies are also numerous among the mix of large and small.

"We work hard at encouraging SME's and start-ups here as well," says Passera, a career French civil servant. "You must have balance both in business and in life." That balance of interesting work and luxurious lifestyle (the sandy beaches of Cannes are a 20minute bus ride away) has attracted plenty of grey matter to Sophia's green hills from all over the world.

Many work at educating others. The Centre for Teaching and Research Applied to Mathematics (CERAM), for example, provides undergraduate and graduate courses in a wide range of computer and business fields. About a quarter of CERAM's students come from abroad. The Theseus Institute offers a cross-cultural MBA in information technology.

The University of Nice at Sophia Antipolis generates IT graduates directly in response to local 'firms' needs. Much of the instruction and almost all business meetings are conducted in English, Sophia Antipolis's working language.

There is one thing, however, that is decidedly French and therefore different from other high-tech hotspots around the world: it was planned. And almost from the beginning has been carefully nurtured by government.

Pierre Lafitte, now a French senator and head of the national government's advisory commission on high technology, was the park's visionary. In 1969, he set up a co-operative to draw nonpolluting businesses to an area whose only industry for more than 100 years had been tourism. "It was in 1996 however that we really turned the corner and we've been growing at 10 per cent a year or better since," says Passera. He says projections are now that the jobs at Sophia Antipolis will more than double over the next five years to 50,000 and thus create a further 100,000 jobs in supporting industries.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Dec 1999
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