The tech sector is taking off in Watauga County

With major companies like Red Hat, Amazon and IBM moving into the Triangle area, central North Carolina is a well-known hot spot for tech.

But as more people are able to work flexibly, some of that tech talent is migrating to the mountains.

For Robert Huddleston, the tech surge has been years in the making. He is CEO of tech company Avoda Group and coworking space Boone Underground and an Appalachian State graduate.

“After we moved Avoda Group here around four years ago, it became really clear that we needed a space to be able to host internships and to provide meetups. I had spent a lot of time in coworking spaces back in Raleigh, and I knew we needed something like that in Boone in order to grow,” said Huddleston. “We built this high-tech, modern space at Boone Underground to host these sorts of things — and believe it or not, probably half of the members are transplants from Raleigh.”

While there is a multi-million dollar project in the works to expand broadband access, Boone Underground currently offers high-speed fiber connections to all members. The coworking space is also open 24/7, has a coffee bar and snacks and offers conference rooms for larger meetings.

COVID put a pause on some boot camps and meetups, but Huddleston plans to see those pick up soon. In doing so, he also hopes to give more local opportunities to App State students.

“Our focus at Avoda Group is all around cloud technology, so these boot camps would be around technologies like Amazon's AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Google's cloud platform — skills that are really needed right now, but trying to find avenues for learning them can be challenging,” said Huddleston. “At Avoda Group one of our goals is to hire more people, so we have a program where we take interns in from App State, we train them, get them certified, and if they're good, we give them jobs. We actually had an intern who converted to a full-time employee and got certified in cloud skills during COVID.”

“We had heard this resounding statement over and over again that these students at App State wanted to stay in the area, but they couldn't,” he finished. “What we're trying to do is bring new tech and high tech and encourage the students to stay.”

Another tech company in the area, ECRS, has similar plans.

A point-of-sale provider that’s been located in Boone for over 30 years, ECRS started with local customers and has grown to provide services to companies in Canada, South America and everywhere in between.

“We have a significant presence at this point, but we're still in Boone because it’s a beautiful place to live, and it's been a really great place to grow the business,” said Caroline Catoe, president of ECRS.

“We hope to make it more known that it's an attractive place for people with technology backgrounds to live and raise families. We do a lot of recruitment off the mountain, in the Raleigh-Durham area. We want to get the word out that there are technology companies in this area, and that there's opportunity here for a tech career.”

Right now, ECRS is filling over a dozen jobs, and Catoe plans to see that growth continue as tech grows in the Boone area.

For Huddleston, Boone Underground has the potential to play a significant role in growing the local tech workforce.

“I'd like to see us hire more students and get them to stay here, and we also have the hope that Boone Underground can double in size. I want to build out one of the first cloud firms here in the High Country, and try to partner more with the university and community college in order to help students get their certifications in cloud technologies from us,” said Huddleston. “We hope to see Boone Underground serve as a launching platform for tech careers.”