Alamo Area’s High Tech Equals High Growth
Published Apr 14, 2008
People said Rackspace would never make it in San Antonio. Now, the company is expanding to nearby Windcrest.
Once a suburb in a slump, the city of Windcrest is on the fast track for revitalization.
Most notable is the extreme makeover of the area’s deserted mall. Rackspace is taking over the 1.2 million-square-foot space, with plans to relocate more than 1,000 employees there in 2008 and thousands more by December 2012.
“If you just take the salary calculations, that’s a $300 million salary base in the area,” Ray Watson, executive director of Windcrest’s Economic Development Corporation, says of Rackspace’s impact. “This is an opportunity for us to have highly skilled jobs in a fast-growing industry. With the airport and downtown nearby, we are ideal for new development.”
Rackspace’s commitment has spurred renewed interest in the area, including talk of a $200 million, master-planned residential development. Another sure sign of economic confidence: Starbucks recently opened its first Windcrest location.
Rackspace, headquartered in San Antonio, helps companies of all sizes host and manage their Web presence.
“We have large data centers that have thousands and thousands of computers hooked to the Internet,” said company spokeswoman Annalie Drusch. “They all have special cooling and monitoring systems to make sure the sites stay up and running.”
The company employs 1,400 people locally and 1,800 worldwide, and has seen 60 percent growth a year for seven years. The average Rackspace salary, Drusch says, is $51,000.
“We love San Antonio,” Drusch says. “We feel like we have the secret San Antonio advantage. In the dot-com days, people said we would never make it here. They said we had to go to the Silicon Valley or at least Austin. But San Antonio has the universities, the schools, the military, which mean we’re able to find the talent we need.”
Community support, Drusch says, has been constant, noting the cities of San Antonio, Windcrest and Bexar County, as well as the state, worked cooperatively on the mall agreement.
“San Antonio is a wonderful place to build a company,” she says. “It has a stable IT environment and is very supportive of entrepreneurs.”
Spaces with large floor plans and ample parking like the old mall are ideal for information technology companies.
New construction is also under way, with Microsoft’s 477,000-square-foot data center scheduled for completion in mid-2008 in San Antonio.
“With 100 employees, it isn’t huge, but the investment of $1 billion over 7 years is,” says Mario Hernandez, president of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation. “It’s very exciting. Having Microsoft’s name here focuses attention on IT here.”
Hernandez says the San Antonio area is experiencing a boom in technology jobs. Banks, investment firms and other agencies have moved data centers to the area, creating thousands of jobs requiring advanced degrees.
San Antonio’s powerful combination of infrastructure, low costs and a strong labor force, Hernandez says, increasingly is attracting corporate America’s attention.
“The service sector is the largest part of our prospect activity,” Hernandez says. “We have 104 companies looking at San Antonio, and more than 40 percent have some type of IT facility.”
Story by Leanne Libby
Photo by Jeff Adkins
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