Switch (company)
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| Private | |
| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Las Vegas, Nevada, United States |
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Key people
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Rob Roy (CEO, founder, chairman) |
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Number of employees
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400-500 |
| Website | www |
Switch is a privately held company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. The company is the developer and operator of the SUPERNAP, data center facilities, and provides colocation, telecommunications, cloud services, and content ecosystems.
Switch was founded in 2000 Rob Roy, CEO and the organization's principal inventor and chief engineer. In 2002, Roy, with the help of a "reclusive majority shareholder", purchased a former Enron facility in Nevada in an auction only attended by Roy since Enron's "fiber plans were so secretive that few people even knew about the auction", with the facility which Enron invested millions of dollar into selling for only $930,000. The facility was built in a rundown area of Las Vegas near E Sahara, constructed right over the "backbone" of fiber optic cables providing service to technology companies nationwide, which Enron sought to use as a way to sell bandwidth to internet service providers like a commodity. Six years later in 2008, Switch was planning to build its first SUPERNAP facility which would "rival anything being built by the likes of Microsoft and Google" for $350 million, with Roy stating that he could store "four times as much gear as those companies do in his center".
Rob Roy holds 218 patents or patent-pending claims for SUPERNAP designs and engineering that have been Tier IV certified by the Uptime Institute. Switch is a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) that sells all telecommunications services.
As of July 2015, half of the company’s 14 top executives are women. Seventy-percent of the current workforce are veterans.
In 2015, the company became the first data center provider in the U.S. to participate in President Barack Obama’s American Business Act on Climate Pledge by announcing that they would join the second round of private sector companies participating in this effort. Under this pledge, and following the company’s commitment to sustainability, Switch is currently constructing the first of two solar farms, which will provide renewable energy to its data centers. As of January 1, 2016 all Switch data centers are 100% powered by clean and renewable energy. In 2016 Switch joined the WWF/WRI Renewable Buyers’ Principles with a public commitment to have their SUPERNAP Michigan data centers also 100% renewably powered.
In 2008, the company opened SUPERNAP 7, a 515,047-square-foot (47,849.4 m2) facility, its seventh data center. Switch has built and is operating in the Las Vegas Digital Exchange campus, which currently consists of three operating SUPERNAP data centers spanning 1,510,926 square feet (140,369 m2) and covering SUPERNAP phases seven through nine. At completion of construction, the Las Vegas Digital Exchange campus will measure more than 2.3-million square feet with 12 buildings completed. As of 2016, SUPERNAP 10 is under construction in Las Vegas with two additional SUPERNAP data centers in planning phases.
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Wikipedia