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July
15, 2001
CHICAGO,
IL --- The business real estate tenant community is marching
toward true broadband connectivity. Meanwhile, a primary
tenant demand is enhanced Internet access speed. So states
a survey of over a thousand building owners and managers
that was completed last year by the Building Owners and
Managers Association (BOMA) International. One owner in
particular, the Lurie Company in downtown Chicago, has
taken this precept to heart. It is using Cogent access
to bolster marketing efforts for leasing its space to
a diversified group of businesses, including high-tech
enterprises. A prime Lurie tenant, inSORS Integrated Communications,
is already taking full advantage of Cogent technology
to significantly increase the speed and reliability of
its product offerings.
Lurie Company and Cogent Partner to Create High Tech High Rise The Lurie Company has recently transformed its LaSalle-Wacker Building in the Chicago central business district into a technology presence through the installation of fiber-optic cable and by offering a welcome mat there for a cluster of tenants who support technical enhancements. Even its corporate web site at www.tlcchicago.com conveys a high-tech aura with camera-eye virtual tours of various buildings. Once Cogent made the building its Chicago hub, Lurie realized it could use Cogent to help market the building while boosting its profitability. Lurie plans to set up a "meet me" room for interested parties to test first-hand Cogent's high-speed Internet access, and to provide insight into the creation of a "high-tech" building. Cogent has also spurred Lurie to look into the temporary rental of rack space for Cogent customers in other locations. Such clients may need immediate access in the interval before Cogent connects their building, and could locate their Internet servers and hookups in the racks without relocating physically. "This is like creating a mini collocation center to immediately address access issues with a temporary solution," said Larry Cohn, Vice President of Lurie. "This model is ingenious," added Guy Banks, Director of Real Estate for Cogent, "because it maximizes the rent of spare office space, and can generate up to three times the rental rates the space would normally bring in through a standard tenant lease." Cogent's fast speed and low-cost access have been instrumental in bringing four tenants to the building at LaSalle-Wacker Building. Two tenants, inSORS and SlamLam, have relocated their businesses in part to gain entrée to Cogent, along with placement in a building geared to serving a high-tech clientele. inSORS leverages Cogent Technology to Deliver Data-Intensive Audio and Video Applications The inSORS company is a Lurie tenant and Cogent client of special interest, as it has employed Cogent technology to slash costs and grow its operations. inSORS develops, tests, and integrates data-intensive voice, video, and audio applications. It accesses the Cogent network from its quarters in the LaSalle-Wacker building to conduct demonstrations of its flagship real-time distance learning and collaboration system, the inSORS Grid (IG) . Brian Gleason, inSORS' Director of Business Development, says price is a key Cogent plus. "Its 100-megabyte at $1,000-a-month service is a price point that makes our system that much more attractive." inSORS carefully evaluated Cogent against rival offerings. "We must have had 15 to 20 service providers through here benchmarking," stated Gleason. "Compared to the offerings of other vendors, the cost savings were striking." So low was Cogent's price that some competing firms "thought Cogent was misquoting us." Speed and quality are other big advantages. The inSORS executive noted that prospective clients were initially "tuning out our conferencing system because it ate up too much bandwidth….We had to crank down the audio and video quality to make it work." Then, after installing Cogent, "we cranked it up to as high as we liked." Cogent's network has allowed the IG product to meet its demanding requirements for instantaneous video, audio, and data interaction among geographically dispersed groups of workers. "We've been able to perform really successful demos of our system for prospective customers." The crispness of the real-time video transmissions is stunning. Some who've dropped in on IG demos, after eyeing the life-like images cast off by its projector, have called out greetings to people on the screen, believing them to be physically in the room. Cogent's ease of installation is another selling point. Cogent installers simply "ran the riser to our suite, and plugged the adapter into our router. We were up and running the same day." The most important result is a bigger, more profitable inSORS. Cogent-fueled applications have "led to expansion of our office space, to more hiring, and to more product development," remarked Gleason. Among those using the IG are corporate training and financial services firms, as well as educational institutions. Indeed, one notable user is the Illinois State Board of Education. The Board is charged with maintaining teacher certification for 26,000 instructors state wide, and is using the IG to give certification classes to educators at far-flung locations. For such customers, notes Gleason, "it's a great return on investment. It decreases travel costs through the ability to disseminate information to greater numbers of people from a single expert." Gleason is upbeat about the growing appeal of data-intensive services. "Once technologies like Cogent bring down costs, applications that use a lot of bandwidth will take off." |
