Texas Gov. Greg Abbott may be opening up the state “100%” and casting masks aside, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. — whose headquarters was newly relocated to Houston — is taking a more cautious approach.
The Silicon Valley pioneer HPE, +0.52%, who with Oracle Corp. ORCL, +0.54%, recently relocated operations to the Lone Star state, told MarketWatch on Wednesday its offices in Texas will remain closed to “all but team members performing essential activities for the time being.”
“Out of an abundance of caution, all safety measures such as masking, distancing and enhanced cleaning that are currently in place at our sites will remain in place,” a company spokeswoman said. “We will make any appropriate changes to our policies and procedures based on the most current medical guidance available to us.”
Separately, HPE said its sites in Texas had recovered from damage associated with winter storms that left millions of people without power.
Oracle, which moved its headquarters to Austin, declined to comment.
The travails of doing business in Texas after decades of calling California home comes amid a migration of tech workers out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Many have moved up or down the highway to flee a largely deserted San Francisco while keeping their jobs.
“The exodus from Silicon Valley narrative is overdone,” Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL who is chief executive of venture-capital firm Revolution, told MarketWatch. “Silicon Valley will continue to be the leader of the pack, but there is freedom to move to other regions without missing out on the industry.”
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