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By MICHAEL BRAGA
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 12, 2000
TAMPA -- In a move that could strengthen the Tampa Bay area's bid to become more of a high-tech mecca, a former call center east of Tampa will be converted to a facility that will house cutting-edge Internet and telecommunications companies.
TelePlace, a Boca Raton company that specializes in providing fully-equipped facilities to telecommunications and Internet companies, has purchased the former Citicorp Services building and plans to transform it into its latest technology center.
This is exactly the kind of development that bay area business leaders are trying to encourage. Dozens of high-tech companies could make use of the building, which was vacated when Citicorp moved to a huge new call center down the road.
TelePlace paid $12-million for the 187,500-square-foot facility and now intends to spend $38-million more to upgrade it by providing backup power generators and fiber-optic cable capacity necessary to attract high-tech customers.
The company, which got $100-million in private equity funding from Arlington, Texas-based Clearview Investments in April, already has built similar technology centers in Miami and Atlanta and is building others in Washington, D.C., and Irvine, Calif.
The centers are designed to attract companies that manage Web sites for their clients. These Internet hosting companies, application service providers and telecommunications firms need to assure their clients that their Web sites will remain up and operating even under extreme conditions.
"Tenants need to see that we provide redundant power supply if their electricity goes down, and that we have redundant fiber links," said Richard Berglund, TelePlace's vice president for real estate.
TelePlace plans to open 32 such high-tech facilities in the United States and Europe by the end of 2002.