September 12, 2008

OKLAHOMA CITY – John Parsons to Hurricane Ike: Bring it on.

Parson’s company, Perimeter Technology, is nearing completion on a nearly 23,000-square-foot building devoted to commercial data storage that can withstand the elements with several built-in backup systems in place. It is just west of the company’s Oklahoma City headquarters at 4100 Perimeter Center Dr.

Parsons, president and CEO of Perimeter, said the building can withstand 160 mph updraft and straight line winds.

“That takes out 99 percent of all tornados that touch the ground in Oklahoma,” he said.

And while Oklahoma does not have major threats from hurricanes and earthquakes, it does have some natural disasters in addition to tornadoes, like the ice storm that knocked out much of the city’s power last year.

The Perimeter building will be fed by dual grids from electric utility OG&E and can draw from four substations. Multiple battery backup systems, two generators housed inside, and a 10,000 gallon diesel storage tank to fuel those generators, have been put in place to keep the building operational even if there is a total loss of outside power.

“We can go indefinitely without power,” Parsons said.

Oklahoma’s place in the center of the country also provides a secure land base that Parsons hopes will draw more business from out of state.

Perimeter was started in 2002 by Parsons and several partners to take over the technology center space that would have been left vacant after Tulsa-based Williams Communications filed for bankruptcy.

The company counts about 85 percent of its business from Oklahoma companies, but Parsons said he expects that to shift, especially as Oklahoma has turned up on the radar of many companies after Google and EDS began building data centers here.

“That turned a lot of eyes to the State of Oklahoma,” Parsons said. “Where we used to field calls from companies outside the state every other month we’ve started getting calls every other week.”

Perimeter purchased 21 acres adjacent to its main offices to build the data center and broke ground in November on the building. Plans are to have it up and running October 1.

Plans call for nine more, similar buildings on the site for an investment that will likely top $100 million. Work on a second building is set to begin in 2009. The company considered existing sites like the vacant Lucent plant, but decided to build from the ground-up to meet all of their specifications.

But the data centers will not require many workers. Perimeter employs about 30 people.

“Commercial data centers are not a real people-intensive technology business,” Parsons said. “That’s what we like about the commercial data business is that it’s not apt to be off-shored like software development.”

Parsons said Perimeter’s network engineers also serve as a sort of security guard for their client’s data so they know their information is safe.

“Running data centers is our core competency,” he said. “We provide them expertise in a particular business process that they don’t need in-house so they can focus their management time on their core competencies.”