Now the company is ready to settle in.
OPSWAT has signed a long-term lease at SkyCenter One, the new office building at Tampa International Airport, the company announced Tuesday.
More than 100 employees will occupy 31,660 square feet on the top floor of the new building starting late this year. That’s about twice the size of its current space in the East Lake-Orient Park area, where it’s been since early 2021. The lease is for 125 months, or nearly 10 1/2 years.
“Being a global operation, we have global customers, we have global employees, we’ve got folks that are coming and going,” said Steve Gorham, OPSWAT’s chief information officer and head of global operations. “So when you look at a property in the airport, one, it’s a fantastic airport, one of the best in the country. But two, the ability to be 10 minutes from an air terminal to our office space? Think about the convenience factor that that has, not just for us or our employees, but our customers and partners and the like. That’s just a fantastic place to be.”
OPSWAT has been looking for a permanent home since moving into the market after purchasing Tampa cybersecurity company Impulse in 2019. During the search for a new headquarters city, it noted the amount of new Class A office space coming online across Tampa, knowing a prime office could help it stand out in the crowded cybersecurity landscape surrounding MacDill Air Force Base, home to U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command.
“You’ve got SOCOM, you’ve got CENTCOM, you’ve got big defense contracting firms as well, all of us butting to that same pool of resources,” Gorham said. “Which makes our location all that much more important as we’re looking to retain and attract and recruit the right folks to come to OPSWAT and grow their careers.”
The new office will emphasize collaboration, Gorham said, with ample space for employees to work together. At the start of 2021, OPSWAT had about 30 employees in Tampa and 350 worldwide. At the end of the year, it had 77 in Tampa and 537 worldwide.
Cybersecurity is a growth industry across the board, but particularly in the sectors in which OPSWAT specializes: critical infrastructure fields like energy, defense and financial services. The threat of Russian retaliation over U.S. intervention in Ukraine has put those sectors on heightened alert, Gorham said. And if the government invests new resources in cybersecurity as part of its infrastructure spending, that could also pay dividends for the company as it grows around the world, he said.
“That’s another cool thing about the airport,” Gorham said. “Having a cybersecurity company that is focused on critical infrastructure protection to be at the heart of one of the largest critical infrastructures in the area is just a fantastic symbiotic relationship.”
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