Tech Campus in Aliso Viejo Gets Big-Name Boost
The much-ballyhooed national chain of business campuses envisioned by Buy.com Inc. founder Scott A. Blum will be backed by a cadre of industry blue chips like Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.--and $100 million.
At a splashy New York press conference set to a Hollywood-style score, Blum and partner Jim Watson unveiled plans Tuesday for their Aliso Viejo-based venture, called Enfrastructure Inc.
Watson said Microsoft, IBM, accounting firm Arthur Andersen and Avaya, a recent Lucent Technologies Inc. spinoff, had ponied up most of the funds for Enfrastructure and agreed to supply their brand-name products to campus tenants.
The heavy hitters’ involvement brings Enfrastructure a giant stride closer to realization, putting what IBM’s Skip Wyatt called muscle behind a sweeping, pie-in-the-sky concept.
“We’re buying into this vision,” said Wyatt, IBM’s vice president for worldwide server sales. “We find it very, very compelling.”
Enfrastructure will need every ounce of its new partners’ capital and prestige to accomplish its goals.
The fledgling enterprise aims to build 18 U.S. campuses in the next four years to provide technology companies with generic, ready-made environments, freeing them to spend their time, energy and capital elsewhere. Then it wants to spread its idea to Asia and Europe.
The first site is slated to open this December in Aliso Viejo, followed shortly by campuses in New York and Denver.
Sounds ambitious, but that’s nothing new for Blum, who, at 36, has started four companies, lost a couple of multimillion-dollar fortunes and rocketed briefly into the ranks of Orange County billionaires when Buy.com went public in February.
The specter of Enfrastructure has inspired both hype and hope since it emerged from Blum’s incubator, ThinkTank LLC, in February.
If successful, the company would be poised to help bolster Orange County’s technology industry. But when its official unveiling was pushed back months and the size of its Aliso Viejo campus was cut by two-thirds, the venture appeared to flounder.
Tuesday’s announcements may restore the project’s momentum.
Companies will be able to rent space, hardware, software, financial services and communications systems from Enfrastructure, expanding or upgrading as needed.
“If they’re distracted by choosing between [Windows] NT or Unix, Apple or IBM, thinking about, ‘Who should I get to do the air conditioning?’, they can’t get down to the real business,” said Bruce Caldwell, a senior analyst at GartnerGroup.
Similar ventures in Europe provide companies with “hoteling,” flexible lease packages that combine real estate with information-technology infrastructure, Caldwell said.
In exchange, Enfrastructure would receive fees and a small equity stake in each tenant business.
Blum said he conceived the company because the drudgery of setting up shop has soaked the lifeblood out of many young entrepreneurs like him and has been a factor in the series of failures that has rattled the industry this year.
“Companies would raise $30 million or $40 million and blow most of it on infrastructure,” he said.
Blum and Watson took pains to stress that their start-up is not another incubator and probably will host more developed businesses. Incubators, which bear the brunt of the tech industry’s monumental failure rate, have become somewhat less trendy of late.
Even after Tuesday’s fanfare, many of Enfrastructure’s details remain sketchy.
Watson said he had signed deals in hand for 15 businesses to go into the Aliso Viejo site, but he would not name any of them.
Blum, who has said ThinkTank will be among the inaugural tenants, characterized most of his prospective neighbors as hardware and software companies. The roster also will include a handful of dot-coms and several biotech companies linked to UC Irvine, he said.
None of Enfrastructure’s other campuses have homes yet, although Watson said he expects to pin down the real estate deals in New York and Denver within the next few weeks.
