Major Firms Back Nationwide Tech Campuses

The much-ballyhooed but untested concept of building a national chain of business technology campuses--envisioned by Buy.com Inc. founder Scott A. Blum--will be backed by Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. and $100 million.

At a splashy New York news 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 in December in Aliso Viejo, followed shortly by campuses in New York and Denver.

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.

In exchange, Enfrastructure will 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 will probably 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.