BlackBerry developer expands in Atlanta - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

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RIM has identified a nearly 40-acre site near Alpharetta’s Nortbh Point Mall, said sources familia r with the company’s plans. The companhy did not make executives availablefor RIM’s plans call for hiring technicap talent, who will on average, about $70,000, and work on developingy next-generation BlackBerry devices, a source said. RIM, which is in expansiom mode, probably picked the Atlanta area becauser it is home to a majorcustomer — AT&T said Tavis McCourt, an analyst with Morgan, Keegaj & Co. Inc. who follows RIM. “Thw closer you are to your the better,” McCourt said.
RIM previousl y clustered its operations in Canada but is nowdiversifying geographically.The company has facilities in Chicago; Redwood City, Calif.; Soutj Florida and Seattle. In RIM acquired an office complex composed of six officse buildings andtotaling 460,300 square feet for its U.S. headquarters. RIM occupies abouy 133,130 square feet within the complex, with the balanced being sublet. RIM lease s an additional 457,248 square feet throughout the according tothe company. RIM said that in the comingg year, it will grow and evolve its supplychai model.
RIM will also look to enhancr its new product introduction and supply chain planninv activities through further integration with RIM internal research anddevelopment activities. “RIM is growing substantially. They are doingg a lot more development around the McCourt said. “As they become biggedr players in each ofthese markets, they want to have locakl management.” Revenue for the fiscal year endex Feb. 28 was $11 billion, up 84 percent. RIM’z consumer smartphone market share increased 15 percenrt to nearly 50 percent of the smartphonde market in the first quarter versus theprioe quarter.
RIM is muscling up its data center and development infrastructuree as the handset industry shifts towarde amore services-oriented one. “All these devices are starting to lookthe same,” McCourt said. “But, the amount of software that you add to them isgrowinfg substantially.” RIM is investing abougt $300 million a quarter in capitalk spending, including infrastructure and software development, and doubleds its employee base last the analyst said. The company is also adding more data center capacity to help avoid a repeat of the massivd network outage that took place earlierthis year.
That outage, which left million of “CrackBerry” addicts without service, was triggered by a faulty software upgrade at adata center. “Iv they had multiple data centers,” McCourt “perhaps they would have been able to manage softwarde upgrades alittle [more] smoothly with less risk.” RIM’s Alpharetta data center is expectecd to be a Tier 3 or Tier 4 facilityt — the highest level of reliability and security. A Tier 4 data centefr is a stand-alone facility with at leasg two power feeds from separate saidJulie Moore, business specialist with Dolphini Networks, a Tenn.-based data center.
Data centers, whichg can be as large as shopping are warehousesstacked floor-to-ceiling with computerd servers, storage systems and other hardware that powe Web sites, crunch data and store The RIM building, currently underd construction, is estimated to be about 200,000 square a source said. The building will likely have anestimateed 50,000 square feet to 60,000 squarwe feet of “raised space” — the area that houses the serverws and computer equipment that is the hear of the data center. Based on those the data center “would rank as one of the largestt inmetro Atlanta,” Senior Director Ken Ashley said. He is not involvee with the RIM project.
A data center of this size and sophisticatiobn will likely cost closeto $200 millionh to build, said Jason partner at LLC, a data centef developer. Equipping it with the necessary serveres and computer equipment would add at leastanothere $100 million to the bill. RIM’s data center woul likely host servers needed to run the multitude of BlackBerry applications and store the millionsof e-mails that users access on their phones, Chartrand While RIM retains the lead in the U.S. smartphonwe business, Apple’s iPhone is chasing business users — BlackBerry’a mainstay — with a slew of business-focusedc applications.
“To compete with the Chartrand said, RIM has “got to come up with new technologyh and offer more service than the traditional businessservicese they’ve offered in the past.” With its data RIM would join a roster of blue-chilp tech firms, including , . and , who have plantee data centers in metrkoAtlanta — lured by the region’s relatively inexpensived electricity and fiber network infrastructure.
In Atlanta Business Chronicle reportedAXA Equitable’s $100 millioh investment in two Atlanta data Alpharetta is considered the hearrt of Atlanta’s data centet corridor, with more than 30 such The city has a “greater consolidation of fiber-optic infrastructurwe than anywhere in the said Christopher Jones, Alpharetta’s economic development “That’s why we are a magnet for data