Almost every major American city has claimed to be the burgeoning, “New Silicon Valley” at some point in the past decade.
However, the vibrato concerning Southern Nevada may actually be true. Las Vegas is stepping up its game for tech and startups. Since the recession, the name of the new game in Las Vegas has been business diversification. Nowhere is that reality more obvious than within the technology boom happening all around us. While it’s not a secret that the Las Vegas economy took a major hit starting in 2008 and continued its decline beyond the recession, not many people are fully dialed into the fact that the Valley is making a comeback.
There are a lot of reasons startups are choosing to call Las Vegas home beyond affordable real estate and favorable tax laws. Tech companies such as INVIEWlabs, a Las Vegas–based technology development company, have a host of uniquely qualified reasons for setting up shop in Las Vegas. One of which is the vast amount of affordable bandwidth and infrastructure here.
An INVIEW software application, UNIFI, has gained a worldwide audience in the architectural, engineering and construction community with users in Australia trailing a close second to users in the United States. As a result, INVIEW executives were contemplating establishing a server stack in an Australian data center to service this fast growing market. However, when the feedback from INVIEWlabs clients revealed that the performance speeds and connectivity from the already established colocation facility in Las Vegas is more than sufficient to service their market, plans to move the company’s data were scrapped.
Reliable, local, and secure data centers have served as catalysts to bring a plethora of new business fields to the state. One of the primary reasons data centers set up shop in Las Vegas is the weather. Although Las Vegas is hot many months of the year, the dry air is easier on fragile mechanical parts. Also, Southern Nevada has not been historically susceptible to natural disasters. There is a general understanding that the only FEMA plan for Las Vegas includes panic and riot. Data centers located in Southern California have the constant and looming threat of earthquakes, as well as the lesser but real threat of coastal tsunamis. There’s no way to predict when one might strike, and even the newer buildings that are made to withstand the violent shaking of the phenomena cannot prevent items from crashing to the ground, creating outages and the potential loss of data. Southern Nevada’s climate and historic lack of potentially disastrous natural phenomenon is a draw for any business, but especially the data centers that house millions of dollars worth of content from local businesses and large, international corporations.
Much of the hubbub can be attributed to the investments of Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, who’s ambitious $300 million Downtown Project has created a haven for new ideas—the type of atmosphere that lures entrepreneurs, techies and creative types like a band of thirsty wanderers to a mirage in the desert.
Companies like Zappos and Switch, a leading colocation provider for mission critical operations, have only enriched the budding technology business landscape. Because a certain level of talent tends to attract that same level of talent, the number of gifted techies flocking to the valley only creates more of a demand for similarly qualified individuals. Talent begets talent, and it appears that the cycle may continue for many years, not just in tech but in every industry migrating to Las Vegas.
Gary Siroky, president of INVIEWlabs.
