SHI Opens New Integration Center in Piscataway
SHI International Corp., a $10 billion privately held provider of technology solutions and products whose headquarters are in Somerset, opened a 400,000-square-foot IT integration center on Ridge Road, in Piscataway, at the end of October.
The company plans to employ about 120 people at this facility, which combines hardware and software components from multiple manufacturers into ready-to-deploy rack systems.
This is SHI’s second integration center in Piscataway. A 300,000-square-foot center on Knox Road will continue its operations. According to a press release, SHI now operates the two largest IT integration facilities east of Chicago.
Over the years, SHI has had several integration centers that it ended up closing, only to open larger ones, said Ed McNamara, senior director of communications and marketing at SHI.
He explained that it’s a lot less expensive for SHI to preconfigure its data-center solutions on the premises in Piscataway, and then ship the products to the customer for installation at the customer’s own data center.
“Our customers, especially those in New York, see real value in doing a lot of the work outside of the city, and then sending it into the city. “Ed McNamara, SHI
“Our customers, especially those in New York, see real value in doing a lot of the work outside of the city, and then sending it into the city. It’s a lot cheaper for us to do this outside of the city because of the premium paid for rent and other overhead,” he said.
“In 2011 we heard people predict that enterprises weren’t going to have data centers anymore, that everything would be in the cloud. It turned out that this is not really the case. Our larger enterprise customers still want to have data centers.”
These days, “We hear from the market that 25 percent of applications that enterprise companies run will be at an on-premise data center. The rest of the applications will reside in a public cloud or will be a Software-as-a-Service solution.”
The new facility has expanded SHI’s capacity, enabling the company to power more than 150 racks simultaneously, along with an increased capacity to build and automate integration workflows in order to increase the efficiency and accuracy of work, the company said in a release. Multi-vendor solutions are racked, cabled, burned in, configured and fully tested prior to delivery.
Partnering with Rutgers
NJTechWeekly.com spoke to McNamara about the company’s recent partnership with Rutgers University for the naming rights of the Rutgers stadium.
The company’s founder, president and CEO, Thai Lee, has moved to Austin, Texas, and the company is opening a facility there, which will come online in February 2020. This facility is slated to house up to 1,000 employees, making that site SHI’s second largest, and prompting unfounded some speculation that the company could leave the Garden State.
McNamara said that Lee is at the SHI office in Somerset weekly for staff meetings and other activities. The company has two buildings in Somerset, at 290 and 300 Davidson Road, about five miles from the Rutgers campus.
He also pointed out that more than 350 of the company’s 2,000 employees in New Jersey are alumni of Rutgers, the largest contingent from any university at the company. SHI employs 4,500 around the globe.
“We are not big advertisers, but when Rutgers approached the company, because of the 30-year bond that existed between us, we liked what they had to say. ” Ed McNamara, SHI
“We are not big advertisers,” said McNamara, “but when Rutgers approached the company, because of the 30-year bond that existed between us, we liked what they had to say. We are proud to explore what else we can do with our partnership.”
As part of the agreement, SHI has received brand exposure through signage in and around the university stadium, including exterior stadium signage, scoreboard signage, campus directional signage and logo placement on the field. Additionally, SHI will receive promotions through a variety of print, digital, radio and television outlets.
McNamara noted that SHI had signed the agreement with Rutgers in July, and football season started just six weeks later, so they’re still trying to understand what else they can do with the partnership.
“We are geographically close to one another and we are culturally aligned, and we are really happy with the partnership thus far,” he concluded.
