Wall Street West Tenant is Acquired

The sole announced tenant for Wall Street West, the state of Pennsylania's data center development initiative, has been acquired. Perimeter eSecurity announced Tuesday that it has bought Secure Electronic Communication Compliance Archival System (SECCAS), a leading outsourced provider of e-messaging compliance services.

Last April SECCAS announced that it would open a secondary data center in Scranton, Pa. The Pennsylvania facility is intended to provide full redundancy for its New York City operations and also serve as the primary location for the firm's litigation-readiness (e-discovery) business. SECCAS is the first and thus far only company to announce a commitment to Wall Street West. It was not immediately clear what effect the acquisition might have on SECCAS' data center plans.

The Wall Street West initiative is backed by a $15 million investment from the federal government and more than $6 million from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Local and state officials believe they can build a successul project atop data backup mandates from the Federal Reserve, SEC and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Level 3 has been hired to build a high-speed fiber network between lower Manhattan and East Stroudsburg, Pa., which is expected to be completed sometime in 2009.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terroist attacks, regulators tasked the financial services industry to develop a backup plan that would allow for a same-day recovery from a "regional disaster" affecting New York and its immediate suburbs.

The plan called for backup centers to be located outside the New York metro area, a request that met with resistance from many Wall Street firms with huge investments in secondary data centers in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Northern New Jersey. The Wall Street West initiative offers the right geography - more than 60 miles from New York and thus outside any blast radius, but within the 125-mile distance that marks the outer limits of many real-time data mirroring technologies.

In its most recent newsletter, Wall Street West said it has met with many New York financial firms, but has not announced any additional commitments. "The firms are at various stages of assessing business expansion, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, and back office operation needs," the group said. "These employer outreach discussions will move ahead on an ongoing basis."