Can This Man Change The Future Of San Leandro?

Everyone knows about Steve Jobs and some people may even understand how his company, Apple Computer, changed the fortunes of Cupertino.

World War II gave the East Bay Henry J. Kaiser, whose legacy live on in many ways, including the here west of Interstate 880.

Earlier this week, Patch ran a series about Daniel and C.L. Best, the father-son team who revolutionized the tractor industry a century ago and created companies that employed 2,000 people in San Leandro well into the 1970s.

The common thread in these and other examples -- Henry Ford and Detroit -- is how an industrial leader founds a company whose success expands beyond its own good fortune to create an ecosystem of suppliers, competitors, spinoffs -- and jobs.

San Leandro is fortunate to have such an industrial leader in , who founded a software company here more than 30 years ago. Today OSIsoft employs more than 700 people, about 300 of them locally.

Headquartered on Davis Street near the downtown BART Station, OSIsoft, is getting increasing recognition in the business community.

Thursday, the company for selling its process control software to energy plants, data centers and other facilities around the world.

Now Kennedy is embarked on a partnership with city leaders that will transform San Leandro's industrial landscape: he is building a fiber optic loop that will make our town one of the best places in the world to do manufacturing as it will be practiced in the 21st Century.

The Economist magazine described the future of widget-making in a recent article titled, "The third industrial revolution."

The article argued that mass production is history. The future lies in mass customization -- using automated production systems and robotic assembly lines to turn out widgets-on-demand. Software programs will drive these auto-production systems.

"Manufacturing is going digital," the Economist said. "Most jobs will not be on the factory floor but in the offices nearby, which will be full of designers, engineers, IT specialists, logistics experts marketing staff and other professionals."

What will link these white-collar command centers with the robo-factories and shipping centers -- fiber optic lines like those being installed in San Leandro.

Kennedy attended a recent public hearing at the Marina Community Center to talk about OSIsoft's plan to build a second campus on the vacant lot west of BART.

He hung around after the hearing carrying some fiber optic cable, coiled up like a lasso, explaining about how each of the 200-plus glass strands in the cable could carry ginormous data files with little or no latency.

Kennedy's fiber loop will give San Leandro the data-highway to drive digital manufacturing. Meanwhile, other trends favor the onshoring of small factories. As the Economist explained: "Companies now want to be closer to their customers so they can respond more quickly to changes in demand."

Close to airports, rail and highway transportation, San Leandro is well positioned again.

Finally, the city has a large swaths of land zoned for industry, a legacy of the days when manufacturers like Daniel and C.L. Best made this a factory city.

It can happen again. We can reindustrialize San Leandro.

(Editor's note: Thanks to Fred Reicker, whose lovely series on the Best family languished in my inbox until The Economist article helped me see how to use the city's past as a harbinger of its future. In future articles I will look at how to assist this reindustrialization and how to anticipate and mitigate some downside consequences.)

(Get San Leandro Patch delivered by email. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter @sanleandropatch)