Agilent Technologies in Palo Alto

Agilent Technologies is one of the largest companies ever born in Palo Alto, though few people outside the industry know the name. It began life in 1999 as most of Hewlett-Packard's original business: the test instruments, chemical analysis tools, medical products and electronic parts that HP had built since the garage days. The new company kept its headquarters on Page Mill Road, on the same piece of land where HP had put up its first building in 1942.

Agilent stayed in Palo Alto for only about seven years before moving its headquarters to Santa Clara. Its old buildings went on to shelter some of the best known names in recent tech history. This profile follows the company through its Palo Alto addresses and explains what happened to them. For the parent company's story, start with our Hewlett-Packard profile.

HP's instrument business

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started their partnership in a garage at 367 Addison Avenue in 1939. Their first product was an audio oscillator, a piece of test equipment. For decades afterward HP was above all an instrument company. It sold oscilloscopes, signal generators, counters and analyzers to engineers and labs around the world. You can still see the garage from the sidewalk. Our HP Garage guide explains what to look for.

HP grew into new fields as it went. In 1965 it bought F&M Scientific, a maker of gas chromatographs, which took it into chemical analysis. It had already added medical equipment in the 1950s. Over time it also built a large business in semiconductors and optoelectronics, such as LEDs. By the late 1990s, though, computers and printers dominated HP's sales and its attention. The older businesses had different customers and needed different management.

The 1999 spinoff

On March 2, 1999, HP announced that it would split off its test and measurement business and several related units as a separate company. It was named Agilent Technologies on July 28, 1999. The name was meant to suggest agility. The launch slogan, "Innovating the HP Way," pointed back to the company's roots.

Agilent started with about 43,000 employees, roughly a third of HP's workforce. Its first president and chief executive was Ned Barnholt, a longtime HP executive. The spinoff covered several lines of business:

• Electronic test and measurement instruments, the core of the old HP
• Chemical analysis and life sciences instruments
• Semiconductors and optoelectronic components
• Medical products, such as patient monitors

On November 18, 1999, Agilent sold about 65 million shares to the public at $30 each. That was about 15 percent of the company. Wikipedia describes it as the largest IPO in Silicon Valley history at the time. HP distributed the rest of its Agilent shares to HP stockholders on June 2, 2000. From that day Agilent was fully independent.

395 Page Mill Road

Agilent made its home at 395 Page Mill Road, near Oregon Expressway and the California Avenue area. SEC filings from January 2001 list it as the company's business and mailing address. The address carries real history. In 1942 HP built its first company-owned building on land it bought there. That 10,000 square foot structure, called the Redwood Building, held offices, a lab and a small factory under one roof.

In 2000 HP built a new headquarters on the site for the spinoff. A GlobeSt report put the cost at $29 million. Later reports describe a campus of about 10 acres with roughly 224,000 square feet of office space. It sits a short walk from the California Avenue Caltrain station, which later tenants would cite as a selling point.

Hard years and a shrinking footprint

Agilent's timing was poor. The telecom and dot-com crash hit soon after the IPO. Customers in communications and chips canceled orders. The company cut deeply. Wikipedia counts 18,500 positions cut in 2003 alone. Agilent also began selling businesses that no longer fit:

• In 2001 it sold its health care business to Philips.
• In 2005 it sold its consumer and industrial chip business to the investment firms KKR and Silver Lake for $2.66 billion. That business became Avago Technologies.
• Also in 2005 it sold its stake in the LED maker Lumileds to Philips.
• In 2006 its semiconductor test business went public as Verigy.

The Avago sale has a Palo Alto twist. Avago bought Broadcom Corporation in 2016 and took the Broadcom name. In November 2023 that company bought VMware and moved its headquarters to 3401 Hillview Avenue in Stanford Research Park. Our VMware profile tells that story. A piece of the old HP chip business is, in a sense, back in Palo Alto.

The move to Santa Clara

A smaller company did not need so many buildings. In May 2006 Agilent sold its Page Mill Road headquarters to Jay Paul Co., a San Francisco real estate firm. The deal let Agilent lease the site back until it moved its headquarters to a campus in Santa Clara in August 2006, as part of a consolidation. GlobeSt later reported the price as about $98 million.

With the move, the company's corporate center left Palo Alto. In 2013 it announced another split. Its electronic measurement business, the direct descendant of HP's first products, became Keysight Technologies on November 1, 2014. Agilent kept its name and focused on laboratory work: instruments, software, services and supplies for life sciences, diagnostics and applied chemistry. Agilent also bought Varian, Inc., one of the three companies that came out of Varian Associates, in 2010. Our Varian profile covers that family tree.

What became of the buildings

Agilent's departure freed up some of the most useful buildings in Stanford Research Park. Several became homes for companies that grew up in Palo Alto in the following decade.

The Facebook move is covered in our Facebook profile. The Deer Creek Road site is part of the Tesla story. For 395 Page Mill Road, GlobeSt reported in July 2007 that Google had leased the full building. In September 2016 Cloudera, the data software company, signed a lease for nearly 230,000 square feet there and planned to move in by late summer 2017. Our Cloudera profile picks up from there.

Timeline

Seeing the sites

All of the former Agilent buildings are private offices. You can see them from public streets but should not walk into lobbies or parking lots. A short loop works well by bike:

1. Start at the California Avenue Caltrain station and cross to Page Mill Road near Oregon Expressway to see 395 Page Mill Road.
2. Ride up Page Mill Road into Stanford Research Park and turn onto California Avenue to pass 1601 California Avenue.
3. Continue to Hanover Street and Deer Creek Road, where HP, Agilent and then Tesla filled the hillside plants.
4. Finish at 1501 Page Mill Road, where HP Inc. is still headquartered.

The research park layout is explained in our Stanford Research Park guide. For a longer route that adds the HP Garage and downtown, follow the famous tech addresses tour.

Agilent today

Agilent is now a Santa Clara company with about 18,100 employees, according to Wikipedia's 2025 figures. It sells to drug makers, hospitals, food safety labs and research universities rather than to electronics engineers. Its Palo Alto chapter was short, but it marks the moment when the original Hewlett-Packard business walked out on its own. The land on Page Mill Road where HP built its first building in 1942 is still working as an office campus today. For more companies with Palo Alto roots, browse our companies guide.

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