Is Raleigh the East Coast’s Silicon Valley?

Talk very long to first time visitors at Raleigh’s All Thing Open conference and sooner or later you’re bound to hear the city compared to Silicon Valley. New attendees are often wowed by their first impression of the scope of the local tech industry, sometimes from merely walking through the rows of vendor booths where there seems to be no shortage of local development houses doing well enough to afford vendor space in order to hawk products and do some networking.