I was reading one of our local papers, the Boulder Dailey Camera, this morning over coffee and the business section had their annual survey of the largest local companies. Sun came in first again this year with 3471 employees closely followed by IBM at 3400 employees.

I started doing some math after a couple of cups of coffee and noticed two things:

• 10% of Sun's employees are employed here in Colorado
• 1% of IMB's employees are employed in Colorado
• Sun's employees cranked out about $380K in revenue last year
• IBM's employees delivered about $257.5K

Now I'm a Sun die-hard and a little biased but I'm proud of a team that delivers strong revenue per employee. 

We have some other great high tech firms here at the foot of the Rocky Mountains -- Ball Aerospace, Level(3), Seagate, Covidien, Amgen, West Corp., Lockheed Martin, Sandoz, Micro Motion, Ricoh, Xilinx, EDS, Epsilon, Medtronic, Lexmark, DigitalGlobe, and Array BioPharma to name some of the bigger employers. We suspect two other storage-related companies would be in the top mix, Brocade and McData, but didn't supply their company's bios.

Storage, printers, biotech, device monitoring, internet infrastructure... hmmm... wonder what kind of interesting mashup could come from the folks in these fields?