🔒The incredible shrinking EMC

In August 1979, former college roommates Richard Egan and Roger Marino founded EMC Corp., a Hopkinton-based technology firm. Seeking to be their own bosses but without a business plan or product idea, the pair initially sold office furniture before moving on to sell computer products for Intel, according to a history of the company published by Forbes.

Eventually, EMC settled on producing memory boards to be used to upgrade existing computers, quickly expanding into other products in the then-rapidly growing world of technology. The company went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 1986, raising $30 million in the process at a time where it had 400 employees.

The growth continued, with the company establishing a large footprint in Hopkinton, eventually expanding its real estate footprint into other MetroWest communities like Southborough.

EMC’s rise culminated in a $67-billion merger with Texas-based Dell Technologies first announced in September 2015 and completed a year later. The move created the world’s largest privately-controlled technology company, according to a Dell press release at the time. The company returned to the public market in December 2018.

Seeking to quell concerns the merger meant the end of EMC’s presence in the region, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said the firm’s presence in Hopkinton was about to get a lot larger, according to the Boston Herald, while a spokesperson for then-Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said the administration was hopeful the newly-merged firm would have a robust presence in the region for years to come.

Dell still has a presence in Hopkinton, owning three properties which feature about 1.28 million square feet of office space. However, since the 2015 merger announcement, the company has off-loaded more than 1.2 million square feet of space spread across nine properties in Central Massachusetts, with a total sales price of $103.22 million. Communities where EMC properties have been sold include Southborough, Westborough, Hopkinton, Franklin, and Milford.

These transactions have come as Dell's value has continued to grow, with its market cap increasing from $37.9 billion in 2018 to around $71 billion in February, according to Yahoo Finance.

At the same time, the company’s global workforce has shrunk 23.6%, from 157,000 in 2019 to 120,000 in 2024, while its total real estate footprint has been reduced 36%, from 31.5 million square feet to 20.2 million, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“We continuously evaluate our business to ensure we’re set up to deliver the best innovation, value, and service to our customers and partners,” Dell wrote in an email to WBJ. “These reviews encompass all aspects of our business from product roadmaps to the real estate footprint.”

Dell declined to make a company representative available for an interview with WBJ regarding its presence in Central Massachusetts.

A reduction in Central Mass. employees

The number of employees Dell EMC has remaining in Central Massachusetts remains a mystery.

The company last responded to the WBJ Research Department’s annual request for total employee numbers in 2022, when it said it had 6,500 employees in Central Massachusetts, down 31% from the 9,400 employees it reported in 2015.

Four properties in Central Massachusetts remain under Dell ownership in Hopkinton and Franklin, totaling about 2 million square feet. The company has offices at three additional buildings it does not own, according to a list of Dell office locations on the company’s website.

The firm’s sale of properties has accelerated since 2024, as it has sold off 753,100 square feet of office and research & development space in that timeframe.

The quality of the type of workers in MetroWest has played a role in why EMC has kept a presence in the region, albeit a diminished one, said Jason Palitsch, executive director of the 495/MetroWest Partnership, a public-private effort between municipalities and businesses to promote growth.

“What helped EMC thrive in the first place and why Dell kept so many operations here for so many years [post-merger] comes back to the types of workers they can hire here,” Palitsch said. “MetroWest has a very highly-skilled, highly-educated, sought-after workforce, which is the reason that companies want to be here.”

Even if the cost of doing business and living in Central Massachusetts is higher than places like Texas, Palitsch said the area’s skilled workforce will continue to make it a place where large firms are interested in locating.

“The business cycle is what it is,” he said. “We're in a moment where a lot of big employers are reconsidering their role with their physical space, but it remains the case that our region is home to the type of employees that help the entity to grow and thrive, and we're seeing other employers want to be here.”

New uses and development

Some of the properties previously owned by EMC were never actually utilized by the firm; a 193,228-square-foot, four-story office building at 900 West Park Drive in Westborough was built on speculation and bought by the firm for $40.46 million in 2001 before offloading the property to Westborough-based software firm eClinicalWorks in 2015 for $21.16 million, according to Town of Westborough property records.

That building remains unused by eClinicalWorks, serving as a representation of the abundance of underutilized office space in the MetroWest region.

A few prior EMC properties have been adapted to new uses; a 52,700-square-foot property in Milford that EMC used as a training center before selling it for $1.7 million in 2022 is now the Milford 911 Training Center. The building had been vacant for seven years but was brought back to life by its new owner, Calare Properties in Framingham, with the help of architectural firm Connolly Brothers, based in Beverly.

More commercial businesses needed

Dell EMC’s most recent property sales were in Southborough, where it has had a presence along the town’s border with Westborough. The firm sold a 193,680-square-foot building at 32 Coslin Drive in December, followed by the sale of a 166,000-square-foot building at 21 Coslin Drive.

Kathryn Cook, chair of the Southborough Select Board, said her interactions with global software giant have been productive, noting it's in both parties' mutual interest to find buyers and new uses.

“EMC Dell has been great,” Cook said. “They reach out to us, and so we've had a good relationship.”

She said the firm was hopeful the Town would make the area part of its MBTA Communities Act zoning, a state-mandated reexamination of municipal zoning laws designed to encourage more multi-family housing production. Southborough instead ended up putting its new residential zones in another part of town, limiting the amount of interest in the Dell-owned properties.

Both of the recent purchases in Southborough were made by Framingham-based Atlantic Management. The firm hasn’t revealed its plans for the former EMC properties and did not respond to a WBJ request for comment on the topic, but the firm has been involved in a few projects in the area where new life was brought into old commercial campuses.

This includes the redevelopment of the former AstraZeneca campus in Westborough into a multi-use site including an Amazon Robotics facility and logistical hub, as well as the reconfiguring of a former Hewlett Packard campus in Marlborough into a live-work-play, multi-use development.

Even with Atlantic’s purchases, more than 230 acres of EMC-owned, undeveloped land sits in the Town of Southborough’s southwest corner. Some of the land is wetlands, and therefore undevelopable, but Cook is hopeful some of that land will eventually be put to good use.

“About 85% of the tax base is residential, while 15% is commercial,” she said. “We really, really need more commercial businesses in this town.”

Eric Casey is the managing editor at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the manufacturing and real estate industries.