Land that was orchards and farmland in 2009 is now a 1,000-company tech corridor
- "Silicon Slopes" runs from Provo to Salt Lake City
- Qualtrics started in a Provo family basement, sold to SAP for $8 billion
- #1 in the nation for economic outlook, 18 years running
- The Beehive State, motto "Industry"
How Utah’s digital economy grew
The University of Utah joins ARPANET
The 4th node in the country, and the first outside California — built on a pioneering computer-graphics program.
From orchards to Silicon Slopes
Josh James, who’d just sold Omniture to Adobe for $1.8 billion in 2009, coined "Silicon Slopes" as marketing shorthand for the tech corridor growing along the Wasatch Front. The name stuck: the ecosystem now counts more than 1,000 companies and startups running from Draper through Lehi and Orem up to Salt Lake City, with Oracle and Microsoft offices now sitting minutes from Adobe’s campus.
The roots go back further than the name. The University of Utah was ARPANET’s 4th node in 1969, built on a computer-graphics program that trained Adobe co-founder John Warnock. BYU alumni built WordPerfect in Orem in 1979, merging it into Novell for $1.4 billion in 1994 — a software industry with a name a generation before "Silicon Slopes" existed.
Homegrown, and honest about the ups and downs
Qualtrics went from a Provo basement in 2002 to an $8 billion SAP acquisition in 2019. Ancestry.com, founded by BYU grads in 1996, sold to Blackstone for $4.7 billion in 2020. Not every story ends in triumph — Pluralsight left Utah for Texas in 2025 after a rocky private-equity chapter — but the pattern of founding, scaling and exiting from the same few miles of the Wasatch Front is real and repeated.
How Utah businesses buy websites
Silicon Slopes gets the headlines, but most of Utah’s businesses are the trades and shops serving towns across the state, not just the Wasatch Front tech corridor.
Trades and home services
Utah is growing fast — say plainly which towns and counties you actually serve.
Professional and B2B services
A tech-heavy economy rewards clarity about exactly what you do.
Shops and hospitality
Clear hours and location, readable on a phone, win the quick local search.
How well do you know Utah’s digital economy?
3 quick questions. Get all 3 right and you win a 10% off discount code. Every answer is somewhere on this page.
Utah quiz · 1 of 3
What Utah company was founded in a family basement in Provo in 2002 and sold to SAP for $8 billion in 2019?
Why FastSites works here
A state whose one-word motto is "Industry" understands the value of just getting things built. A clear one-page site, live in days, at a published price, is that same instinct for a small business.