RICHARDSON, Texas -- Ennovate Networks has curbed its appetite for Texas talent.

In the past two weeks, Ennovate has dismissed its in-house recruiter here and put plans to hire several area engineers on hold. Light Reading sources say that Ennovate's current Richardson staff also has been told that they will need to spend between "a few weeks and several months" in the company's Boston offices, helping to resolve software bugs and add new features to Ennovate's Envoy 1600 switch.

Ennovate founder and senior vice president Ian Mashiter is playing down the strategy changes. "The Richardson facility was set up to look at next-generation product architectures and recruit staff to work on our present platform," he says. "And we're continuing to do that."

What has changed, Mashiter says, is that a loosening job market in the Boston area has made finding engineering talent there much easier (see IronBridge Has Fallen Down). After hiring four times as many Boston-area employees as it had intended in January, Ennovate's original plan of running a 100-person Texas-based R&D center, as announced in August 2000, has cooled, he says.

Ennovate now has only 13 of its 220 employees located here. Mashiter says Ennovate is still growing and figures it will hire between 10 and 20 people a month for a while. However, he doesn't know how many of those new hires, if any, will be in Texas.

Other firms based in Texas, while appreciative that at least one more startup won’t be after the same local talent pool, say that their Texas-based hiring hasn’t slowed down. Rapid5 Networks, an Ennovate competitor, says it will add around 50 people by the year’s end to its San Jose, Calif., and Richardson facilities.

-- Phil Harvey, senior editor, Light Reading http://www.lightreading.com