Indians Invest in Cleveland Data Center

November 30, 2010 Alex Woodie

Infocrossing, a U.S.-based outsourcer that is owned by the Indian IT giant Wipro, is making a big investment to create a state-of-the-art data center in Cleveland County, North Carolina. Infocrossing says the new data center says will run all major operating platforms–including IBM i–and create more than a dozen American jobs.

It is ironic that, at a time when displaced American IT workers are bitter over losing their jobs to overseas rivals who work for less, that an Indian company made rich through outsourcing is investing millions of dollars to create an outsourcing center that will employ . . . Americans.

Wipro–a $6 billion outsourcing juggernaut based in Bangalore, India–will spend a total of $75 million to purchase a vacant 215,000-square-foot building in Kings Mountain (near Charlotte), convert it into a modern data center, and pay about 17 IT professionals to run it over the next four years, according to a Data Center Knowledge.com article.

That’s not a lot of jobs. But Wipro’s investment is indicative of a larger trend that is seeing strong job growth outside the large American cities that have traditionally driven the economy. Along with Texas, Utah, and Virginia, North Carolina has turned into a veritable Mecca for high tech firms.

Other companies that recently announced plans to build data centers in the Tar Heel State include Google, Apple, and Facebook. Much of the tech-related job growth in North Carolina has been the Raleigh-Durham area, which Newsweek recently dubbed one of the “New Silicon Valleys,” and now it appears that growth is moving west into the Charlotte area.

“Our vision for our Cleveland County data center is to not only increase our data center footprint, but build a data center that brings the best infrastructure technology to our clients,” stated Sameer Kishore, president of Wipro Infocrossing. “Wipro Infocrossing is committed to building localized and global delivery capabilities, something which we, and our customers, believe differentiates us from our competitors.”

Wipro says its new Infocrossing data center will feature fully redundant systems, and will meet the Uptime Institute‘s Tier III rating. More than 80,000 square feet of raised-floor space will be used to run a mix of IBM i, mainframe, Windows, Unix, and Linux servers, according to Wipro and Data Center Knowledge.com. Infocrossing has been providing outsourced IBM i services through the platform’s last four name changes.

Leonia, New Jersey-based Infocrossing, which Wipro acquired in 2007, currently runs five data centers, according to its website. That number will grow to seven with the new data center in North Carolina and another in Germany.