You may see John Deere tractors mowing grass and cultivating crops. But, make no mistake, Deere thinks of itself now as a tech company that makes farming equipment.
So, while Austin may not be especially fertile farming terrain, it's stocked with the type of tech talent Deere & Company wants to attract. With that in mind, the company on Feb. 24 said it is opening a 10,000-square-foot technology office just south of downtown Austin.
The Deere tech hub will operate on two upper floors of a building at 1333 S. Congress that has on its bottom floor a retail store for Austin boot company Tecovas. The company plans to hire 75 to 100 people in the next year or so for its local office, with focus on data scientists, embedded software developers, systems engineers and software developers.
For Deere, Austin was a "no brainer," said Julian Sanchez, Deere's director of emerging technology.
"It gives us the opportunity to bring diverse perspectives, people who already are well educated and well versed in the technologies that that we need," he said, noting proximity to The University of Texas and several local startup accelerators. "It also puts us regionally in a part of the country where we have close access to John Deere customers."
Deere also operates tech hubs in San Francisco, Illinois, Germany, Brazil and India. The company expects Austin to become one of its largest and most impactful development hubs.
Already, the company has about a dozen employees in Austin. Sanchez said he expects Austin's team to largely be focused on embedded software in its vehicles that processes new data from the cloud. That could be new data about cultivation paths in fields, as well as broader updates.
"If you think about a John Deere vehicle, it's a highly automated and, in some cases, fully autonomous machine," he said. "And it's not just an autonomous vehicle that sits on its own out there. It's got a whole stack of telematics solutions that send data and receive data from the cloud. So one of the teams specifically that we want to build out down there for Austin is a team that would work on the embedded software for the tractor, that would be receiving commands from the cloud and receiving data from the cloud about what to do next."
Deere said it will likely have an office grand opening in April. This will be the company's first real presence in Austin, and Sanchez said he hopes the city will embrace it.
"The fun thing for us is the Deere brand in and of itself carries a whole lot of like mainstream appeal," he said. "So there's nothing more fun than a John Deere hat or a John Deere something. So one of the things that we're really looking at is to make sure that any Austin resident tech worker that ends up at our facility working there immediately sort of just gets embraced by that John Deere brand and proudly starts to show it around. Our brand, just a flavor of our brand, the culture of our brand, will sort of fit in really nice with the Austin vibes."
Sanchez said the company knows most people identify it as a tractor company, but they love to explain why they're a tech company when at CES and other major tech shows.
"We're not just a tractor company," he said. "We do make tractors. But there's a whole a whole lot of software and a whole lot of technology on those tractors. And so I think we're excited to to be able to engage with the Austin community and be able to tell that story."
Deere adds to a growing list of global companies with a technology development hub in Austin. Other companies with tech hubs in Austin include Walmart, Ford, Ericsson, Home Depot, H-E-B and Optiver.
