Google Inc. will close its Arizona offices, housed in the University Services Building on the Tempe campus on Nov. 21.
The announcement, posted on the official Google blog Friday by Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, cited internal problems as the reason the office will shut down.
“We’ve found that despite everyone’s best efforts, the projects our engineers have been working on in Arizona have been, and remain, highly fractured,” Eustace said in the blog. “So after a lot of soul searching we have decided to incorporate work on these projects into teams elsewhere at Google.”
The office, which opened in 2006, was in charge of Google’s internal information system, meaning it worked on “everything that makes Google, well, Google,” said Sunny Gettinger.
Gettinger said having the finance and human resource departments separated from their clients proved to be too difficult. The Arizona office will be consolidated with larger offices primarily in California and New York to better serve their clients, she said.
Despite the move, Google will continue its relationship with the University, Gettinger said.
“We’ve actually had a great relationship with ASU, and we work with them on a lot of projects,” she said. “We’ve obviously hired a lot of grads and had a lot of interns, and we hope that will continue no matter where we are.”
Gettinger said Google’s internship program would continue, but students will have to look outside Phoenix for these opportunities.
Xin Sun, a former Google intern who graduated from ASU in 2006 with a degree in computer sciences, said the closure is unfortunate for ASU students.
“It was kind of unexpected,” said Sun, who interned with Google this summer in Seattle. “It’s not good news for ASU students who want to work locally; they will no longer have that option.”
ASU spokeswoman Julie Newberg said in an e-mail that all of the University and Google’s joint initiatives will continue despite the office’s closure.
These projects include Cloud Computing Curriculum, Android Curriculum, Google Mars, Google Apps for Education, Lively by Google, Google Apps @ IDEAL and Google@School, she said.
Shilo Mitchell, a representative from Gov. Janet Napolitano’s office, said the closure is unfortunate but will not be a blow to the state’s economy.
“It is disappointing, but it does appear to be an isolated reallocation of resources for one company, and there’s actually a lot going on still in Arizona,” Mitchell said. “This is by no way a fatal blow.”
Mitchell said she didn’t think Google would be the last Internet company to set up offices in Arizona.
“Arizona is a great place to do business, so I’m sure there will be other companies that will have interest in coming to Arizona and we’ll work with them,” she said.
Reach the reporter at allison.gatlin@asu.edu.
