But Agnello, who retired two years ago from Sun and now lives in the Chicago suburb of Inverness, says he did the right thing by building the center. Agnello recently was in Denver as a keynote speaker of the Rocky Mountain chapter's CORENET conference. Sun provides hardware and software and services that power the Internet and enterprise networks.

He calls his decision to build the Broomfield campus a "grand-slam home run," noting that at that time Sun was so overwhelmed with orders that it many employees were working out of trailers. After conducting a nationwide search, he settled on the Denver area because of the high quality of the workforce, the ease to attracted educated people, and to do so at a lower costs.

"You always had choices," Agnello, a former senior vice president of real estate for the Santa Clara, CA-based company, tells GlobeSt.com. "Wecould have crammed everyone into the Bay area, paying exorbitant salaries and cost for space. But that would not have a good decision."

At the time, there was an incorrect perception that only talented engineers and computer scientists could be found in Silicon Valley, he says. "By building the campus in Broomfield, we were able to lower Sun's overall cost per employee by diversifying on a geographic basis," he explains. He is not unsympathetic, however, to people who moved to Denver, bought a house and either lost it in a foreclosure or had to sell it for a loss after losing their job. "That is unfortunate and always sad," he tells GlobeSt.com.

But while it may seem obvious in hindsight the tech boom was a bubble ready to bust, it was not at all apparent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he notes. An incredible amount of money was being spent on IT improvements by companies, businesses were beefing up technology because of—unfounded--fears of Y2K, and the overall economy was the strongest it had ever been, he says. Also, you can't underestimate the impact of the Internet, which was just starting to make its mark, he notes. He says many brilliant people say the advent of the Internet was akin to how Thomas Edison changed the country with the light bulb. If Sun or any other company backed off the promise of the Internet, it would have been irresponsible, he says.

Indeed, the only thing he would have liked to do different is not ask for any government subsidies to build the campus, even though they are modest in Colorado, compared to other states, he says. Agnello says virtually every state in the country is going through budget problems, which means cuts in education funding. The model he would like companies such as Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packers and others to adopt is to forgo the incentives and take that money and invest it in education instead. That way, companies would be assured qualified workers for the long-term, he says. Ultimately, it would be much more beneficial than getting subsidies from state and local governments, he believes.