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New firm capitalizes on former Williams Communications technology
By mobile | January 29, 2008
It would have been a crying shame to let Williams Communications’ technology facility go to waste, thought a group of former employees and Jim Mason, vice president of technology for The State Chamber.
When Tulsa-based Williams Communications filed for bankruptcy last year, its technology facility at 4100 Perimeter Center Dr. in Oklahoma City was going to be cleaned out and turned back into office space, per the lease agreement with the building owner.
“This facility was a jewel of technology in Oklahoma,” Mason said, “and it was in danger of being dismantled. When I found out I started putting people together, trying to help the building owner understand what he really had here.”
“What he had” was a world-class technology facility that has provided high-level data center services for numerous Fortune 500 companies, from Ernst & Young and IBM to MTV and McDonald’s.
The facility, created in the late 1990s, had been the primary support hub for Rock Island Group, then Webcasts.com, then iBeam Broadcasting and finally Williams Communications. Each of those companies invested a lot of “’90s boom money” into the facility, according to management, creating an infrastructure worth about $3 million. The Tier 1 data center provides disaster recovery, application hosting, backup storage, satellite downlinks and streaming media.
A partnership including Anodyne Technologies, which was formed by a number of former Williams Communications personnel; Anodyne’s President Stan Chase and others came together to form Perimeter Technology Center.
Terry Morrison “was the top guy in charge of the facility” for Williams, said Perimeter’s President John Parsons. Parsons came to the company with nine years of experience in the sales and marketing industry.
After months of negotiations, Perimeter was able to secure the facility - fully intact - and assemble the eight-member operations and engineering group that had created and maintained the facility over the last six years. The new company moved into the site on March 1.
Perimeter Technology can offer companies in state and around the country complete survivability, storage and retrieval of secure electronic data, and broadband connectivity.
“Until today, Oklahoma companies had to go out of state to access this type of facility,” Chase said. Many local companies get this kind of service from Dallas, Mason agreed.
“This world-class facility is one of the most technologically advanced data centers in the state and region,” said Parsons.
The facility has voice and data broadband connectivity, featuring two independent, redundant fiber systems operating on 24 strands of fiber with an OC-12 SONET ring aperture and an OC-3 ATM ring, and major satellite down-link capabilities with a large ground-based disk and 10 rooftop antennae. Both Cox and Southwestern Bell each run multiple fibers in the system.
Raised flooring and three separate heating and air conditioning systems keep the facility climate-controlled.
When the regular electricity utility (1,200 amp OG&E 3-phase grid) is not working, the facility is backed up by a battery “big enough to fill a room and a half,” and by a massive generator “that can run indefinitely on diesel fuel,” Parsons said, enabling the facility to offer 99.999 percent availability.
Simply put: When the electricity went off during last year’s ice storm, this facility kept going. Over the last two years, the center has not lost connectivity for even a second, said Parsons.
This is important to companies that are handling more and more critical applications using a wide area network, Parsons said. Losing connectivity “can be incredibly expensive, either in reputation or by losing contact with customers or workers,” Parsons said. “These companies need access to their data all the time.”
Not only can the center provide data services for the well- established, major corporations, but the facility can act as a business accelerator for smaller companies which could utilize Perimeter’s services rather than take on the expense of buying such equipment - if their budget would even allow for such a large expenditure.
“A data center is the single most expensive attribute of a technology center,” said Morrison. “Making available a world-class facility like this to young technology companies will provide a significant boost in their chances for success.”
Topics: Communication Technology |
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