Is eTech Center Hope for Future?

Electronic-based Business Campus Will Be ‘One-stop Shopping’ for High-tech Tenants

by Michael Barrett

To many of us, computers are only as good as simplicity of function and the knowledge that someone gifted in their many complexities is but a phone call away. The same could be said about companies that possess the talents and abilities to make electronic technology work profitably for them but want to keep it uncomplicated, reasonably priced and well serviced, with plenty of advice readily available.

What has become known as Mount Vernon’s eTech Center (as in eBusiness and e-mail) tries to accomplish all of that. Its anchor business, WebEKG, while serving mostly Fortune 1,000 customers worldwide, has all the tools to assist local high-tech companies, which choose to partner with them, to function and thrive.

Paul Schweikert III, a former Marine “techie” who has profited well from owning six computer-based businesses, most of them in the Bay Area of California, is the catalyst for the development scheme, which includes conversion of a state institutional building and an old movie theater into a well-wired campus of offices and suites. The center’s draw is not only electronic; it will also involve sharing of expertise and cooperation.

“We’re looking for guys who are working in garages now but are starting to become successful,” Schweikert states, “the ones who say, ‘We need to be bringing in clients, hosting our site, delivering our product in a more engineering-type environment where we have backup systems and a proprietary mail system, where there are necessary things to build a single business in the high-tech industry and provide those features and services and grow with the building.’”

Schweikert’s partners in the eTech Center are better known to Skagitonians: developer and real estate mogul John Ellis, who previously owned Century 21 All-Pro in Burlington, and developer-builder Dan Mitzel, responsible for Salem Lutheran Church, Holiday Inn Express and Nookachamp Hills, among other accomplishments. Together, Mitzel and Ellis built the Cascade Professional Building across from Cascade Mall.

“John and I were already partners in the other building,” Mitzel explains about how the triumvirate was set up. “A year ago, Paul came to us for office space, which we gave him. Then he and John got together and asked me to become involved as the contractor on this project. We went in one third each on the eTech Center.” The company they formed is EMS Corp., which stands for Ellis, Mitzel and Schweikert.

 

Up to 1,000 employees

The center, at 1800 Continental Place, comprises 100-110 acres of land and the two existing structures, with another on the drawing board. At full capacity, the campus could employ as many as 1,000 higher-paid, high-tech workers and support personnel in a wide range of electronic-oriented businesses.

“We’re in phase one; filling this up is our next goal,” Mitzel says of the state Department of Social and Health Service (DSHS) structure, which they purchased for $800,000 from a Stanwood developer. They added $1.5 million on the retrofit, including the new data center and other high-tech amenities. “We’re focusing on the smaller, suites concept of this building. There’ll be 15-20 full-service suites at 110 square feet or more each, depending on how we configure them. We have our own phone center and essentially can take care of everything; it’s one-stop shopping.” One other business, Office Systems Northwest, has signed up so far.

Eventually, but not immediately, the three plan to do the same with the old Cinema 5 building in back but prefer to wait for both need and perhaps another major tenant, one that would dictate just how high-tech that part of the campus will become. They paid $850,000 for the moviehouse and expect to put $1 million to $1.5 million into its makeover. A third building would be constructed in between, but only when enough tenancy is available.

The largest selling point for drawing in small businesses to the eTech campus is the package Ellis, Mitzel and Schweikert offer. To begin with, Schweikert’s business is big enough to require a sophisticated data center that costs “probably what a nice home does,” he says, along with the phone center and capability to plug into high-speed, fiber-optic cable that’s fast becoming available in the area. A fiber-optic line is 60 feet from the door of the center, across the street at the Mount Vernon Police Department and Municipal Courts, he says. EMS also controls its own telephone system with Internet connections.

“We’ve got a lot of services here, really, when it comes down to it, with the data center, backup power and redundancy,” Ellis observes. Redundancy is a backup system in which signals come and go — in this case at 1,000 gigabits per second — through two or more means so that if one fails, the other immediately takes over.

Pete Person, WebEKG’s chief systems man, explains: “We have copper connection to the C.O. (Verizon Central Office) in Mount Vernon. How that’s transmitted from there — fiber optics, copper, whatever — is how it gets to Seattle. We’ve also put in a microwave link to the Qwest backbone in Bellingham. It’s a point-to-point connection to Qwest and is capable of 16 megabits per second.” If the copper line fails, the microwave takes over, and vice versa.

 

Techies exchanging ideas

The other big selling point will be proximity to similar businesses. Schweikert says the Silicon Valley, near his previous home, became a hub for high technology in America a few decades ago because the people in the industry wanted to be together, to exchange ideas, even jobs.

“If you want to bring high-tech business to this valley, this is the way to do it, because engineers like to flock together,” Schweikert states. “Wherever the brains are, that’s where they want to be. There’s nothing more an engineer wants to talk about with another engineer than the code he wrote. They’re like scientists. They work together. That’s why Silicon Valley has been so successful. That’s where they all are.”

WebEKG, with 55 employees, has been growing at a rate of $350,000 a month in revenues since it opened at the Cascade Professional Center. Schweikert recruited 35 engineers and support personnel right from Skagit County.

“Some were commuting to Seattle,” he says. “A couple were graduates going down there to find work. We want to try to offer area graduates jobs here. We’d like to have 10-20 software companies right here in the eTech Center.”

“It’s the whole idea of having a business synergy happening in a building,” Mitzel puts in, “to be able to walk down the hall and find someone to ask about a business problem.”

“The synergy in the building will pay the rent,” Schweikert quips.

From a broader perspective, the eTech Center is at the calm center of a small hurricane over carrier rights. The City of Mount Vernon, under the aegis of Mayor Skye Richendrfer, a techie himself, has been installing a loop fiber-optic cable line that would link city facilities and offer services to other government entities such as Skagit Valley College, as well as private businesses, for a nominal fee. The rub is: so are Verizon, AT&T and other utilities that feel the city is competing unfairly for the business.

Recently, the county got into the fray by denying the city allocation of $250,000 in sales-tax revenues to help complete the job, with two of the commissioners, Ted Anderson and Don Munks, siding with Verizon’s claim. Commissioner Ken Dahlstedt, the only Democrat, took the city’s side.

“They (commissioners) see is the business issue,” Schweikert says.

“The fact is, what Skye is trying to do has some merit,” Mitzel remarks, “because if you look at businesses that are bandwidth intensive, they’re spending anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 a month on bandwidth requirements. If they can get a reduction of bandwidth cost of 20-40 percent because of a system that the city owns, it would be to their benefit.”

 

Monopolizing bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time and is measured in megabits, one being 1.54 million bits. If a conventional modem transmits 57,600 bps (bits per second), it would take nearly 27 seconds to transmit one megabit. In the case of the Qwest microwave link mentioned above, the speed of transmission is 16 megabits per second, or 665 times faster than the modem.

Verizon, according to Mitzel, has a monopoly on bandwidths in this area. “They want to protect that monopoly,” he adds. “There’s competition there and they don’t like it.”

“They’re really political,” Schweikert puts in. “They put their name on everything — like they’re doing something, and in the background they’re doing nothing.”

One buys bandwidth either wholesale or on an as-needed basis, according to Person. “It always has been an expensive way to communicate and always will be,” he adds.

The fight over bandwidth control and service to businesses will continue, but it shouldn’t affect the eTech Campus, which relies on its own connectivity with the outside world. On the other hand, linking with the fiber-optic system the city is developing would be a boon.

The center, meantime, has competition of its own to contend with — finding tenants willing to pay the higher rent that goes along with high-tech amenities.

“Primary businesses that look at our amenities package and see those features are who we’re looking for,” Mitzel contends.

“We’re not going to win on rent, in terms of competing in the marketplace,” he continues. “We’re going to win on overall package of what they need to promote their businesses in terms of physical space, building features, building services, bandwidth services and everything that goes into higher-tech-type business.

“Communications today,” he concludes, “are so critical to people’s decision-making processes of where they locate. State-of-the-art communications, whether Internet based or voice-line based, is vitally important.”

For more information about the eTech Center, its amenities, suite availability and other factors, call 404-5656.