Lucent Technologies Inc. will expand significantly its research and development campus in the Lisle-Naperville area by adding two buildings that could accommodate as many as 2,000 more employees, the company said Tuesday.
The two 600,000-square-foot buildings will be about 80 percent offices and 20 percent laboratories to be used by employees who design and develop communications networks and wireless systems for phone service providers.
Lucent, which designs and manufactures phone-switching systems, currently has 10,500 employees at the campus in DuPage County; when the new buildings are completed by the end of 2000, the campus will have space for 12,500.
Although Lucent doesn’t have a timetable for adding employees, it is constantly hiring engineers and software programmers and designers, a company spokesman said. The current boom in telecommunications equipment spawned by new services such as wireless phone systems and high-speed data connections requires the firm to keep increasing its work force.
“We have some turnover with people retiring and leaving, and we’re expanding,” said Robert Jerich, a Lucent spokesman. “So we’re constantly looking for good people with the skills we need. There is a lot of competition for these people out here in what we call the Silicon Prairie.”
Not all of the extra space will go to new Lucent employees, however: Some of it is needed just to house the current work force, he said.
“We now have temporary modules out here that literally have wheels under them,” Jerich said. “We probably have 1,000 people in those temporary buildings, and they’ll move into our new buildings once they are built. And we’ll continue expanding our work force out here.”
Lucent’s west suburban expansion points to the Chicago area’s rise to the nation’s fourth-biggest technology economy, led by Motorola Inc., 3Com Corp. and Lucent.
“Telecommunications, information technologies and life sciences are the region’s big three tech engines,” said Tom Thornton, president of the Illinois Coalition, a non-profit group that promotes technology enterprise in the state. “Our telecommunications tradition goes back to the days of radio manufacturing.
“The dark side of this,” he added, “is that all of these companies now say that getting skilled people is their single largest issue.”
Lucent didn’t put a price tag on its expansion, but the infrastructure required for the new laboratories will push costs well above the $250 million that office buildings of this size would cost to build.
“These new buildings underscore Lucent’s investment in research and development by providing our employees with the latest technology available to help them rapidly exchange information and ideas,” said Pete Lessek, vice president of switching and access R&D.
Though Lucent’s headquarters are in Murray Hill, N.J., the firm’s campus in DuPage County has more employees than any other Lucent facility. The 18,500 Lucent employees in New Jersey are scattered across five different campuses.
Lucent’s large presence in the Chicago area dates back to the days of the Bell System, when Bell Labs and Western Electric had major facilities in this area. Lucent was spun off from AT&T Corp. in 1996; it includes AT&T’s former equipment-making arm and most of its former research arm, Bell Laboratories.
The new buildings will be equipped with the latest in Lucent’s high-speed communications technologies, providing high-capacity voice and data connections with speeds up to 100 megabits per second linking offices, labs and meeting rooms.
One of the buildings will be in Naperville on the northwest corner of Naperville and Warrenville Roads in front of Lucent’s Indian Hills main facility. The Lisle facility will be built south of the company’s Network Software Center just off Warrenville Road.
Construction is scheduled to begin this summer and is expected to bring more traffic to already crowded highways in the area.
On Tuesday, the DuPage County Board approved spending nearly $338,000 for a preliminary engineering study that will look at ways to unsnarl traffic in the area–where the East-West Tollway empties into the targeted intersection.
Interim County Board Chairman John Case said that finding a solution to the traffic congestion is a priority.
“This is a project that is well worthwhile if we can move things along,” said Case, who added that the announcement was good news for DuPage and that it virtually commits the county to building road improvements in the area.
“If it’s a priority, we’ll figure out what we need to do to fund it and go ahead,” Case said.
