As NCR prepares to vacate Columbus, firm enjoying posh new offices in Midtown Atlanta

As it is preparing to vacate its large facilities in Columbus later this year, NCR Corp. has already moved into one of two posh office towers in Midtown Atlanta that will serve as its headquarters campus presumably for years to come. That’s its commitment to Georgia.

NCR staffers began relocating from the firm’s north Atlanta headquarters in Duluth to a sparkling new tower in January at 864 Spring St., with the second tower expected to open later this year. The 750,000-square-foot property that can house about 5,000 employees was constructed by Cousins Properties, which is long-term leasing it to NCR.

Calling its new home state of the art, the company that abandoned its global headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, where it was founded in 1884, flying into the Atlanta suburb in 2009, will have very comfortable amenities in its twin towers.

There are restaurants on site, a coffee bar, a fitness center, a lecture hall and a garden-like courtyard. In the general vicinity of the new headquarters, there are a number of upscale and eclectic eateries. There also is an innovation lab space for product development on site, with NCR planning to nurture its current partnership with nearby Georgia Tech. (Click here for a short video on the new office towers)

“This campus symbolizes the power of reinvention. It celebrates the innovators, dreamers and problem-solvers who walk through our doors everyday and have the courage to build a better tomorrow. Our move to Midtown is part of our vision for transforming Atlanta into the Silicon Valley of the East,” NCR Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bill Nuti said in January.

Nuti since then has stepped down as CEO due to health issues and is now chairman emeritus. The company announced April 30 that he has been succeeded by financial industry veteran Michael Hayford.

A week before Hayford took the job as CEO, NCR announced to Columbus city officials that its two plants here will be closed, one in August and the other by October. That will mean the loss of 360 fulltime NCR employees and nearly 700 temporary staffing, or contract, workers that the firm used to assemble automated teller machines (ATMs) and point-of-sale equipment. The company has operated locally since 2009.

NCR presumably will now begin to market the soon-to-be-empty Columbus facilities in Corporate Ridge Business Park and Muscogee Technology Park, with a major assist from the city and its economic development staff.

“We’re extremely short on large industrial buildings. Being able to use that to get people to come down here and give us a look is a challenge that we’ve been trying to work on,” Russ Carreker, chairman of the Development Authority of Columbus, said after NCR’s local announcement as he searched for any silver lining possible in the painful loss of more than 1,000 jobs.

For NCR, as it enjoys its new Midtown Atlanta office headquarters, it is searching for ways to make more money on the software side of the financial industry, meaning it wants to become less reliant on hardware manufacturing and mine the cloud-based data business for more cash flow.

On a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week, NCR management talked of the “difficult but necessary” steps they are taking to help reinvent the company while becoming more efficient. They spoke of closing three manufacturing plants — the two in Columbus and another in China — to shift production to its three remaining facilities and a third-party contract firm, Florida-based Jabil.

The NCR executives said they expect the restructuring to accelerate the firm’s transformation into a software-led revenue generator, with cuts and efficiencies that include the Columbus plant closings amounting to savings of $150 million a year by 2020.

With its new Midtown Atlanta headquarters, NCR worked with the Georgia Department of Economic Development and a group called Invest Atlanta on the $450 million public and private investment. Construction on the build-to-suit project began in November 2015.

This story was originally published May 9, 2018 at 8:57 AM with the headline "As NCR prepares to vacate Columbus, firm enjoying posh new offices in Midtown Atlanta."