Enfrastructure Scouring Denver for High-Tech Campus

DENVER-This city is being ticketed for a 150,000-sf to 200,000-sf office campus tailored for young technology companies on their way up. The campus is the brainstorm of Enfrastructure, an Alisa Viejo, CA-based, firm that has raised more than $100 million in financing from such heavyweights as Microsoft, IBM and Arthur Anderson.

Plans call for the campus to open in first quarter 2001, following on the heels of one opening in Orange County, CA. “Either Denver or New York will be second and third,” says James Watson, president. In early 2001, Enfrastructure plans to open a campus in Hong Kong, home port for investor Hanny Holdings Ltd., an optical and storage media maker and distributor. In all, 25 campuses, ranging in size from 150,000 sf to 500,000 sf, are in the firm’s long-range international plan.

Watson founded the company along with Scott Blum, who has ties to Denver. Blum is the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded buy.com and Think Tank, an incubator operation.Enfrastructure will offer services from its financial backers that promise to reduce front-end company costs by as much as 90% and ongoing business functions by 25% to 40%. The realized savings can be applied to core operations, says Watson. “This is not an incubator although it will have an incubator component,” he told GlobeSt.com. Eventually, the services provided by partnering companies will be outsourced to existing businesses, says Watson, noting some Fortune 500 firms already have expressed interest in the offering.

Aside from computer-related services, Enfrastructure also will provide brick-and-mortar amenities ranging from dry cleaners to fitness centers.

In Denver, Enfrastructure has looked at a building at the Gates Rubber plant at Interstate 25 and Broadway and the 31-story 406,000-sf empty office tower at 1616 Glenarm Place. “The thing is the real estate market in Denver is just really tight,” says Vince Connelly, an Enfrastructure executive based in Denver. A location decision will be forthcoming in October. According to Watson, the search is focusing on the Downtown submarket.

Watson says the campus will make Denver even more of a magnet for drawing high-tech companies here. “We have very ambitious plans,” he says. “What we’re setting out to accomplish, offering all of this technology and services on one platform, has never been done before. It’s going to create a technology hub in Colorado.”

The Enfrastructure strategy calls for a 2% to 7% equity stake in tenants leasing on a month-to-month basis in exchange for the heavily discounted services. The campus will appeal particularly to companies in second, third or fourth funding stages, says Connelly.