If any company can say it "built" Silicon Valley, it's Rudolph and Sletten. The Foster City, CA-based construction company has planned, developed, and built office and manufacturing facilities for just about every major Silicon Valley manufacturer, from industry pioneers to latter-day market leaders.
Rudolph and Sletten's early customers include Fairchild Semiconductor and Memorex, two of the Valley's first successful start-ups. More recently, it has developed corporate campuses for Veritas Software, Apple Computer, HP, and Sun Microsystems.
At any given time, the 800-employee company has about 50 large-scale construction projects in the works. Rudolph and Sletten is, for example, rebuilding the LAMC Sunset Hospital in Los Angeles, the new Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California Engineering Building Unit 3B in San Diego.
Because of their complex nature--we're talking huge, multimillion dollar sites, with subcontractors working on hundreds of construction-related jobs spread across several acres--the company's projects often take years to complete and involve dozens of employees. That makes the operations trailer at each Rudolph and Sletten construction site a sort of de facto regional office, but one with a twist.
Each site's information services requirements are similar to those of any remote office: They all need high-speed connectivity to the company's headquarters in order to access business-critical applications, including construction planning and collaboration programs and e-mail. The twist is that they lack the stability of a permanent location. Running a mission-critical network out of a trailer isn't for the faint of heart, especially when connected via temporary broadband links, surrounded by heavy construction traffic, and managed by non-technical users.
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