Company’s Executives Trading Westside L.A. for Quiet Simi Valley : Industry: Whittaker Corp. moves its headquarters near a silent electronics plant it hopes to see boom again.

As he walked across the eerily empty factory floor of the Whittaker Corp. electronics plant in Simi Valley, Chief Executive Officer Tom Brancati kept juxtaposing the used-to-bes with the going-to-bes.

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Whittaker used to do 70% of its business with the military. Today, government contracts account for only about 30% of the company’s revenue. Next year, it’s going to be 20%, Brancati said.

Whittaker used to be a billion-dollar company in fields ranging from HMOs to boats and shopping carts; now it’s down to about $150 million in sales.

But riding the boom of a newly developed telecommunications business built on swords-to-plowshares technology, it’s going to be a billion-dollar company again by 1999, Brancati predicted. And it’s going to remake itself in a new home in Simi Valley.

On Friday, the company’s high-rent, high-rise corporate headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles became a used-to-be. By Monday, the offices of Brancati and about 30 other executives will relocate to a Simi Valley industrial park near the sharply scaled-down electronics factory.

It was a tough move, Brancati said.

“We were on the eighth floor, right on a beautiful corner. We were there for 20 years,” he said.

Two upper-level administrators who couldn’t handle the commute to Simi Valley quit as a result of the move, Brancati said.

In Simi Valley, though, the move is nothing but good news.

“We’re very happy to have them,” Mayor Greg Stratton said. “They’ve been a good part of the community and a real asset.”

Executives of the shrunken defense giant point to the relocation as an example of the choices that have made it successful in reducing its reliance on defense contracts. The value of the company’s stock has tripled since 1990, Brancati said.

“We do that by making these kinds of hard decisions,” he said.

The memory of the restaurants and conveniences of the Westside will stay with executives like so many other ghosts of the company’s past.

In the factory, doors open with bangs that echo through the otherwise silent interior. What used to be state-of-the-art computerized weapons-design laboratories now collect dust. Outside, a radar array designed to mimic Soviet systems aims mutely skyward, its camouflage paint failing to disguise its uselessness.

“This is a casualty of the Cold War,” Brancati said, pointing at the radar system.

So, too, are the corporate jets once used to shuttle Whittaker executives to far-flung factories and international clients. “We got rid of those,” Brancati said. “Those were the old days.”

The company’s experience as a defense contractor is far from useless, however.

Such work as building spare parts for radar systems, monitors for U.S. Navy Aegis cruisers and signal data converters for Trident submarines still keep a staff of about 400, down from 650, employed at the Simi Valley factory. Executives also tout the prospects of an electronic protection system called the Shortstop, designed to explode incoming mortar shells in the air before they hit defending troops.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the company’s defense technology is called asynchronous transfer mode. It’s a way of organizing video, digital and voice information into bursts, allowing the information to flow quickly along the same fiber optic wire. Originally developed to protect airplanes in combat, the technology is now used by companies linking their computer networks with those of telephone companies.

Jim Schultz, the director of business development, said that eventually the technology may be used for video servers that would send home videos to consumers on demand. For the moment, though, Whittaker is concentrating on selling the servers to hospitals, colleges and other customers that need to keep track of visual records such as X-rays.