IBM officially opens "Mass Lab" tomorrow, company's biggest software campus in North America

Wednesday is the ribbon-cutting ceremony at IBM's "Mass Lab" campus spanning Littleton and Westford. It's Big Blue's biggest campus in North America devoted to software development, with about 3,400 employees. The company broke ground on the new campus in 2008, and folks started moving in late last year. Parts of the campus were once used by Digital Equipment Corp. and HP.

Among the pooh-bahs who'll be present tomorrow morning are Governor Deval Patrick; Greg Bialecki, the Commonwealth's secretary of housing and economic development; Mass Tech Leadership Council head Tom Hopcroft; MITX director Kiki Mills; and from IBM, Steve Mills, the senior vice president of IBM Software and Alistair Rennie, the general manager of Lotus (who is IBM's top exec in Massachusetts). Apparently, IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano must've had an important tee time tomorrow; he has yet to visit the new facility, I'm told.

IBM spokesperson Karen Lilla says that IBM first came to Massachusetts almost a century ago, opening a sales office here. More recently, the company has acquired more than a dozen Massachusetts companies since 2003, including Ascential Software, Cognos, WebDialogs, BowStreet, and Ounce Labs.

The event tomorrow will also include an announcement about IBM's enterprise mobile strategy, and some demos. Mills is expecting it to bring about 150 non-IBMers, including journos and analysts, to the new campus. IBM's other big facilities in Massachusetts are in Cambridge and Waltham.