01 — Local economy
Business in San Jose, CA
Chip design and networking define the South Bay economy. Cisco, Adobe, PayPal, eBay and Zoom are headquartered in San Jose, with Apple, Nvidia, Intel, Applied Materials and Google minutes away in Cupertino, Santa Clara and Mountain View. Beneath them sits a supplier layer of contract manufacturers, precision machine shops, test labs and electronics distributors.
Also known as Silicon Valley.
Where software helps: Hardware startups and contract manufacturers here manage multi-level bills of materials, engineering change orders and component shortages across offshore suppliers, where a mismatch between ERP and engineering data stalls production.