Connectria has since built a profitable niche in complex hosting, providing managed services for mid- to large-sized enterprise companies looking to outsource their business applications. The company supports a range of technologies, but a particular strength is its expertise in IBM platforms and applications.

Big Blue A Key Partner
That has helped Connectria emerge as a subcontractor for IBM Global Services, Big Blue’s huge enterprise hosting operation. That relationship has helped Connectria grow to 100 employees and revenue of $25 million, according to Scott Azzolina, the company’s vice president of marketing.

“The IBM iSeries platform is a real strong niche for us,” said Azzolina. “We started in complex hosting and then evolved to offer standard hosting products.”

As Connectria’s hosting business grew, it opened a 10,000 square foot data center at 210 N. Tucker, a major data center hub in downtown St. Louis. It later added anther 10,000 square feet at 900 Walnut Street.

In 2006 Connectria launched Red Plaid Hosting, a service targeted to the small business market. It now accounts for about 30 percent of the company’s revenue. Connectria recently retired the Red Plaid brand and is now offering all hosting services under the Connectria umbrella.

Connectria’s business is focused on security solutions and high-touch customer support. Its growth has come predominantly through word of mouth and customer recommendations.

“All the demand has typically come from search or customer references,” said Azzolina. “Our key differentiation is in the complex hosintg market. One challenge is that not a lot of people know who we are.We’re sort of a well-kept secret. But we’re looking to change that.”

The exterior of 210 N. Tucker, the St. Louis data center hub, which had a major power upgrade in 2010.

Demand for data center space is boosting the commercial real estate market in downtown St. Louis, according to the New York Times, which cites a recent lease by Unisys as a sign that the city “may become a regional hub for computer software and data center companies.”

Unisys leased 10,000 square feet of space at 555 Washington Avenue in a deal seen as a key symbolic win for St. Louis, which won out over Minneapolis and Salt Lake City in the bid for the Unisys project. The Unisys facility is described alternately as a data center, IT center and software development center. The company says it has 65 employees in the current space and could eventually grow to 300 employees in 60,000 square feet. Those staffing numbers suggest that a good chunk of the space is probably for offices rather than servers.

But the Unisys deal isn’t the only sign of demand in downtown St. Louis.  Last Year Digital Realty Trust added 16 megawatts of power capacity at 210 North Tucker, one of the two carrier hotel properties the company owns downtown. Last year Xiolink bought a building that once housed a printing press for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and is investing $14 million to renovate the building as a data center hub.

While the Times focused on the downtown area, the suburbs of St. Louis are home to several new facilities, including research centers for two of the industry’s leading vendors of power and cooling equipment.

In 2009 Emerson Network Power built a $50 million data center at its St. Louis headquarters campus that features the state’s largest solar array and saves energy by using slightly higher voltage in its power distribution system. Here’s a picture:

Emerson Network Power has installed this 7,800 square foot solar array on the roof of its new St. Louis data center.

In 2007 Schneider Electric, the parent company of APC, built a 100,000 square foot technology center in the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon. The facility includes 11,000 square feet of working raised floor space for customer testing, as well as a 9,000 square foot area with dual air chambers to create test environments ranging from 50 degrees to 110 degrees (see video).

St. Louis is also home to the corporate headquarters of managed hosting and cloud computing provider Savvis, which are located in a 156,000 square foot building in Town & Country, Missouri that’s owned by Digital Realty Trust.

“This is the largest investment in new technology that Scottrade has ever made,” said Rodger Riney, president and CEO of Scottrade. “We have seen remarkable growth in recent years, and this data center will allow our technology and customer base to continue to expand at the rate we expect.”

The project was designed by Cisco’s Advanced Services, the business group within Cisco that helps customers design high-performance networks. Development of the new data center was a joint effort between Scottrade, Cisco, EMC, Dell and Microsoft.

“The new Scottrade Data Center is an advanced deployment that will provide significant productivity benefits to the company and its customers,” said Doug Gourlay, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s Data Center Technology Group. “Powering this mission-critical data center are more than 50 Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches which offer high-density 10-gigabit connectivity with advanced load balancing and security features, in addition to a wide range of other Cisco switching and routing products. This scalable network investment, with the capacity to process more than one million trade executions per day, allows Scottrade to add more features to its trading systems and continue to provide a high level of service to customers worldwide.”

Scottrade.com is the online trading site of Scottrade, where customers can place orders online for just $7 per trade.

GameRail operates a high speed network that directly connects online game players to the servers that host the most popular and demanding titles. By deploying with a unique network peering approach to ISPs, universities and game server providers (GSPs), GameRail is able to deliver superior performance to its subscribers. Low latency (“lag”) is crucial in multiplayer first-person shooter games like CounterStrike, where a slow connection can much up gameplay and/or leave a player at a competitive disadvantage. The service, which is free during its current beta period, eventually plans to charge $15 a month for subscribers.

“Because of the Peering opportunities with the Bandwidth Exchange Buildings’ existing clients, we are able to fast start our network and also provide superior performance for our peer’s online gaming subscribers,” said GameRail’s CEO Blake Ashby. “Turning up in a carrier hotel like the Bandwidth Exchange Buildings also give us rapid access to leading carriers to build a national network.”

GameRail describes itself as “is an evolution in the network model specifically designed to minimize latency and improve a computer gamer’s online experience.” GameRail allows gaming traffic to get on the private network in the gamer’s home city and then transit over the private network all the way to the site of the game server. GameRail can reduces network hops (and thus latency).

If you’re interested in learning more about the game hosting/GSP market, check out the Game Hosting Guide for a directory of providers and resources.

The Bandwidth Exchange Buildings are the premier carrier hotels in the St. Louis market. The two properties, the Tucker Building at 210 North Tucker and the Valley Building at 900 Walnut, together comprise more than 500,000 square feet of space.

The buildings featured in an unusual series of transactions during the dot-com boom. The buildings were redeveloped for telecom by a team led by current owner Bob Guller, which then sold the properties to wireless network operator Pinnacle, which paid $56 million for them in August 2000. Pinnacle’s expansion into the colocation market was short-lived, and it soon put the buildings on the market. In November 2001 Guller and his partners bought the buildings back for $22 million, $34 million less than they had sold them for barely a year earlier.