CenterPoint EnergyEconomic DevelopmentEconomic Development
 
Office & Professional Services – Ken Courville, Manager

Within the office and professional services sector, our focus is primarily on data centers. Generally speaking, a data center is a centralized repository for the storage, management and dissemination of data and information pertaining to a particular business or organization. A data center may be synonymous with a financial center, network operations center, telecom center, call center, command and control center, trading floor, emergency operation center or web hosting facility. Based on these descriptions, CenterPoint Energy already has a foothold in this market, as most of our local Fortune 500 firms have some type of data center in their headquarters.

CenterPoint Energy will see the most opportunities from local companies who are looking at consolidating their operations in the Houston region. Based on past successes, we have identified four key locational factors that influence the viability of a consolidation or relocation:

  1. Reliable power
  2. Workforce depth and quality
  3. Ability to leverage existing corporate resources
  4. Feasibility of adjoining operations and infrastructure

In the coming years, the following forces will influence change within the data center market:

  • Need for consolidations and expansions
  • Cost pressures
  • Changes in operational procedures
  • New redundancy requirements
  • Incremental power requirements
  • Changes in mission
  • Constrained floor space
  • New equipment
  • Incremental cooling demand

The Data Center Institute recently revealed five bold predictions for the data center industry nationwide over the coming years:

  • The talent pool of qualified senior-level technical and management data center professionals will shrink by 45 percent.
  • More than half of all data centers will have to relocate to new facilities or outsource some applications.
  • Power failures and limits on power availability will halt data center operations at more than 90 percent of all companies.
  • Nearly 70 percent of all data centers will utilize some form of grid computing or other virtual process.
  • One out of every four data centers will experience a business disruption serious enough to affect the entire company’s ability to continue business-as-usual.