High Tech Company to Relocate to Downtown Aurora

Written by Steve Lord, Aurora Beacon-News. November 24, 2015.

A high tech, technology support company will move to the former Aurora Public Library building in downtown Aurora. Support Companies, LLC, which provides tech support to manufacturers of electronics, among other things, will bring about 100 jobs to downtown Aurora, purchasing and renovating the former library building at Stolp Avenue and Benton Street.

David A. Hulseberg from Invest Aurora speaks during a press conference at the old Aurora Public Library building in downtown Aurora Monday. A high tech company will move into the building. (Sean King / The Beacon-News)

David A. Hulseberg from Invest Aurora speaks during a press conference at the old Aurora Public Library building in downtown Aurora Monday. A high tech company will move into the building. (Sean King / The Beacon-News)

Announcement of the arrangement was made Monday afternoon in the old library building by officials from Support Companies, the city of Aurora, the Aurora Public Library, and Invest Aurora, the city's redevelopment corporation formerly known as Seize the Future.

"Only six months after the library relocated to its new building, there is a viable plan to repurpose another building," said Mayor Tom Weisner. "For 20 years this has been a premier technology company. I'm really impressed with these folks, not just what they do, but how they do it. They are progressive in the way they work with their folks."

Support Companies, LLC, or The Support Companies, and its sister companies, are among the premiere technical and customer support enterprises in the Midwest, according to city officials. Ron Janusz, The Support Companies president, said his company has been around a little more than 20 years, based on the far East Side of Aurora. About 75 percent of the company's 100 employees live in Aurora.

Residents surrounded the Aurora Public Library to give it a symbolic group hug as it closed its doors for the last time in Aurora in May as a new main library facility was opened. On Monday it was announced a high tech company will take over the old library buliding. (Sean King / The Beacon-News)

Clients include large counties, banking institutions, hotels and national corporate users. The former library building will house its 24-hour, seven-days-a-week contact center, training and product labs, IT server operations and administrative offices. Janusz estimated the company will open operations in the former library building by the middle of 2016.

The company will buy the building from the library for $10. It will make a $50,000 donation to the Aurora Library Foundation for each of the next five years, a total $250,000 donation. Officials said the company will close on the property before the end of the year.

John Savage, Library Board president, said as part of the deal, the library will be able to continue to house its bookmobile in the garage at the back of the old building. The library will reimburse Invest Aurora $25,000 for brokering the deal, and putting together the request for proposals necessary to market the library building.

Also, the property will go on the property tax rolls for the first time ever, benefiting all Aurora taxing bodies, particularly East Aurora School District 131.

"We faced a dilemma as to what to do with this building," Savage said. "We focused on putting it back on the tax rolls."

Treasure hunters find chairs, shelves and memories at Aurora library

Savage said the library reached out to Invest Aurora for help in marketing the building. The redevelopment company put out requests for proposals, but got only one possible viable answer from a company that was unable to finalize a deal, said David Hulseberg, Invest Aurora CEO. Hulseberg said the deal with The Support Companies came about as the result of a routine retention visit from Invest Aurora. Support Companies complained that is taxes were too high in its current location, and Hulseberg suggested they "look at the downtown."

Janusz said the key factors in taking the former library building was: it was already hooked up to Onlight Aurora, the city's 62-mile fiber optic network; and the proximity to Waubonsee Community College's downtown campus, which can "be a great source of talent for us."

"And it's a great old building," Janusz said. "We can do some special things with it."

Weisner pointed out that Onlight Aurora was a key factor, because the company needs a lot of bandwidth for its work. He said with 100 employees relocating downtown, it's like the "third leg of the stool" for a downtown already committed to residential and entertainment uses.

"It takes people, and it takes people with jobs," Weisner said.

The Library Board last week approved its part of the arrangement, which the city still has to approve through an intergovernmental agreement with the library. That arrangement should be coming through the City Council pipeline, through the Finance Committee to start with, soon.

 The 1904 Aurora Public Library at Stolp Avenue and Benton Street doesn't have a morsel of reading material left inside, but that didn't stop the memories from rushing in.

Monday's announcement also was the official debut of Invest Aurora, the name which the former Seize the Future board approved several weeks ago but has not officially announced. To make it official still needs state of Illinois approval, but the company is using the name now, which Hulseberg said fits the not-for-profit company's mission better.

"Seize the Future is a fine name, but it doesn't tell you what we do, and where it is," he said. "We invest in Aurora. It suits our mission better."

OnLight Aurora Establishes Presence in ByteGrid Data Center

Press release from BYTEGRID.

OnLight Aurora, a fiber optic network ISP and "middle mile" provider of dark fiber and lite wave connectivity within Aurora, IL today announced it has established a key point of presence (PoP) in BYTEGRID's new data center in Aurora, IL. Sometimes referred to as the "fourth utility," OnLight will provide BYTEGRID customers with access to OnLight Aurora's high-availability fiber network including multi-homed Metro Ethernet service and low latency wave interconnection to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world's second-largest financial exchange for futures and options.

"OnLight Aurora is the focused leader in interconnection and connectivity for the city of Aurora, the second largest city in Illinois," said Don Goodwin, EVP Marketing and Leasing for BYTEGRID. "In addition to the CME and access to the financial trading community, OnLight Aurora's advanced fiber optic ring creates endless possibilities for any enterprise or Government organization with high-bandwidth applications requiring compliance and industry leading speed, reliability, latency and redundancy."

BYTEGRID is Chicago's newest Tier 3 multi-tenant data center provider. Its Aurora/Chicago (CH1) facility is a purpose-built data center that has been built and tested for the compliant and high availability needs of the financial services sector. The property benefits from proven data center operations, a highly reliable power grid, and rich fiber connectivity.

In January, BYTEGRID announced the acquisition of the 70,000 square foot Aurora facility that features 34,000 square feet of raised floor computer room space and is generally regarded as one of the premier enterprise data centers in the Chicago market. It was built by one of the country's largest commercial insurance companies in 2007 to meet the emphasis it placed on business resilience and the need for increased capacity and scale over time, as well as the stringent financial services industry regulatory and compliance requirements.

"BYTEGRID is rapidly emerging as a leading provider of compliant-grade critical data center solutions with a rapidly growing national footprint," said Peter Lynch, President, OnLight Aurora. "OnLight is establishing its presence in CH1 based on BYTEGRID's highly interconnected fabric of dynamic capacity, connectivity, and ecosystem community encompassing large enterprises, service providers and government organizations."

Since its acquisition BYTEGRID has converted the facility into a multi-tenant data center and is leasing approximately 25,000 square feet of enterprise-class, Tier 3 data center colocation space featuring 6 megawatts of power capacity available to serve enterprise, government and service providers.

BYTEGRID's data centers are highly secure, compliant business platforms serving some of the world's largest companies and government agencies, including, among others, a Fortune 15 global financial services company and a Fortune 50 global security and aerospace firm.

Technical Specifications of BYTEGRID's CH1:

• 70,000 ft2 secure data center facility featuring over 34,000 ft2 of conditioned raised floor space on a 5+ acre campus

• Tier 3 facility provides redundancy, resiliency, and multi-factor security protocols required for achieving industry specific physical security compliance such as PCI, HIPAA and FISMA • 2N UPS power, N+1 mechanical systems

• Fiber-rich environment convenient to multiple carriers

• 6MW utility power

• Available technical office space

Overall, BYTEGRID owns and operates six data centers in five geographically dispersed markets encompassing more than 700,000 square feet of premier multi-tenant colocation data center space meeting the highest standards for security and reliability. The Company is currently leasing space in most of these centers while pursuing the acquisition of additional facilities this year and beyond.

About BYTEGRID®

BYTEGRID Holdings LLC, is a privately-held company headquartered in Northern Virginia focused exclusively on the nationwide acquisition, development and operation of premier data center facilities. The company serves the growing need for mission-critical data center space by providing highly secure, interconnected, carrier-neutral, and density-robust data centers that serve commercial, government and service provider markets. BYTEGRID currently owns and operates data centers in the Washington, D.C., Atlanta, GA, Cleveland, OH, Chicago, IL, and Ft. Worth metro markets with plans to acquire additional facilities in 2014. The company is led by industry veterans with significant experience in data center operations, design and construction; data center sales and marketing; real estate development and finance; and telecommunications. For more information, please visit www.BYTEGRID.com

OnLight Aurora Partners with the City for Better Connectivity in Illinois

Written by Lisa Gonzalez. The content that follows was originally published on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance website.

Nine years ago, Aurora officials decided it was time to reduce telecommunications costs and upgrade to a faster, more reliable network. The local government built a fiber network to service municipal government, but developed long-term ideas for the network to benefit the entire community.

Nonprofit OnLight Aurora now uses the City’s fiber optic network to provide high-speed connectivity to educational institutions, businesses, healthcare facilities, social service entities, and major non-profits. The organization leases fibers from the City’s fiber optic network and provides Internet access at affordable rates.

Aurora is the second most populous city in Illinois. The municipal government spans 52 buildings over 46 square miles. Before the city’s fiber network, connections were a patchwork of varying speeds and capabilities. Employees in a building with a slow connection would need to travel to City Hall to access a high-speed connections to use the city’s bandwidth intensive applications. The network was old, unreliable, and expensive. The Director of Onlight Aurora recently spoke with Drew Clark from Broadband Breakfast :

“In 2005-2006, we came to the conclusion that we were paying $500,000 a year [to telecommunications providers] for leased line expenses,” said Peter Lynch, Director and President of Onlight Aurora.

The 60-mile network, constructed from 2008 – 2011, cost approximately $7 million to deploy. At the beginning of the process, payback was estimated at 10 years. While the short-term goal was to cut municipal connectivity costs, community leaders intended to expand its use in other ways. The City now saves approximately $485,000 each year from having eliminated leased lines. From a Cisco case study on Aurora [PDF]:

“With local governments increasingly facing limited resources, you have to be able to find efficiencies in operations.” Although the cost savings are gratifying, [Ted] Beck,[Chief Technology Officer] notes that that was just the beginning: “The priority for the fiber optic network was initially cost savings; however we’re realizing that the benefits don’t end there. We’ve had some super wins with this technology, and we’re going to keep leveraging the infrastructure.” Mayor Weisner confirms these successes: “Pretty quickly, we saw a return on investment, both financially and otherwise. We have a much greater capability and fewer problems.” 

In 2011, Aurora received a Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) grant from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) administered through the Illinois Department of Transportation. When the FHWA sought communities for the pilot program and accompanying grant, Aurora’s existing fiber network was a plus. During construction of the city network, Aurora had installed extra fiber strands in its conduit. City traffic engineers used several strands to synchronize intersections to improve traffic flow. The grant, of approximately $12 million, upgraded 60 traffic signals. It also allowed Aurora to eliminate all remaining debt on the network.

From the Broadband Breakfast article:

“We have been able to see better movement of traffic, which alleviates congestion and air quality,” said Eric Gallt, the city’s Traffic Engineer. The fiber loop enables city traffic officials “to see what is going on remotely, and it decreased the cost of the project by 50 percent or more.”

That same year, Mayor Tom Weisner formed a broadband task force to field specific ideas for best utilizing the fiber optic network. In 2012 the group created non-profit OnLight Aurora. The organization received a $25,000 grant and a three-year $150,000 loan from the City. OnLight and Aurora entered into a 20-year agreement for OnLight to lease network fiber strands from the City. OnLight would then lease access to the fiber backbone to other entities at affordable rates.

In 2012, OnLight Aurora received a $1 million Illinois Gigabit Communities Challenge award. The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity awarded the grant as seed money. OnLight Aurora also received another $1 million in matching public and private funds. The organization used the funds to offset costs of connecting customers and to expand to better reach developing business parks and healthcare facilities. Schools, medical centers, social services agencies, arts & entertainment entities, and businesses now connect to the network at speeds of up to 10 Gbps.

In August 2013, Indian Prairie School District 204 announced its plans to expand its technology program. The connection allows the District to connect two of its data centers. District 204 obtains a 10 Gbps connection from OnLight Aurora for $39,600 per year. OnLight provides ample bandwidth for the district’s bring-your-own-device initiative. A portion of the $1 million Illinois Gigabit Communities Challenge grant paid for the cost of connecting the fiber.

OnLight also offers wireless connections as an economical way to serve small- and medium-sized businesses. OnLight uses city-owned towers and buildings that are already connected to the fiber for wireless point-to-point connections. The wireless complement will connect schools, businesses, and other entities when a lengthy fiber connection is too costly.

Businesses in Aurora are connecting to the fiber. An August Beacon-News article on the wireless plan also tells the story of security company Alarm Detection Systems (ADS). The company went from T1 connections at 1.5 Mbps to 20 Mbps connections from OnLight for approximately $500 per month. From the article:

While cases vary based on a number of factors, the upfront installation cost for Alarm Detection Systems offices to connect directly to the fiber network are about $19,000, according to [company IT Manager Mark] Schramm. But the reliable and fast connection will save the company money in the long run.
“We’re saving money and believe we’re getting a better product,” he said.

According the a recent Beacon-News article, OnLight Aurora is now reaching out to local businesses through seminars. An article about the January 29th seminar quoted a city official:

“Attendees will receive the necessary tools to better understand and employ the OnLight Aurora network resource for their businesses and organizations,” said Clayton Muhammad, Aurora Director of Communications.

OnLight Aurora’s three year plan includes doubling it’s current length to 100 miles. The network is completely underground and any carrier has access to the infrastructure.

 

About Lisa Gonzalez: 
Lisa Gonzalez researches and reports on telecommunications and municipal networks’ impact on life at the local level. Lisa has worked in politics, education, and as a freelance journalist. In addition to her contributions at ILSR.org, Lisa writes for MuniNetworks.org and produces the Broadband Bits podcast.