Corporate real estate and portfolio, building operations, capital projects, the facilities side of the data center, and the smart-building systems on top of them. We bring an engineer's eye to the lease, the base building, and the systems that have to perform inside it. We advise and oversee, and we hold no broker, vendor, or construction interest, so the recommendation serves the building and the budget.
The real estate and facilities practice reflects how Tom Marsh has worked since the start, inside semiconductor manufacturing where the line between technology and physical plant does not exist, then across two software companies whose growth was paced by their data centers and their offices. The result is an advisor who reads a building the way an engineer does: what it can carry, what it will cost to operate, and where the lease, the code, or the regulator will say no.
We work the whole life of a building, from site selection and the decision to lease or build, through capital projects and commissioning, to the daily operation and the eventual exit. The decisions hold up over the life of the building, and the oversight runs to acceptance, the same as on the technology side. When a facilities problem turns out to have a network or data center dimension, which it often does, the other practice is already in the room. The pressures that now dominate facilities capital planning, power density, cooling, energy strategy, and the limits of the grid, are the ones this practice already works through on real projects.
Most engagements draw on several of these at once. We scope to the problem, not to a service catalog.
Site selection, leasing and lease negotiation, renewals, acquisitions, dispositions, and consolidations, the real estate side of mergers and acquisitions, and the broker and landlord management around all of it. The lease economics and capital budgeting are grounded in a general management program at Duke's Fuqua School.
Hard and soft services, building operations and maintenance, physical security and asset protection, and environmental health and safety. The operating discipline follows the Penn State ProFM standard for facilities management.
Precision cooling and CRAC, power and electrical distribution, UPS and standby power, fire suppression, and physical security, through to the Tier III-and-above critical-environment build. Power and life safety are worked to NFPA electrical-safety standards, backed by formal NFPA certification. The IT inside the room, the fabric and compute, is handled by the Technology practice.
Buildouts and capital programs from inception through delivery, with code and regulatory compliance, and owner's-representative oversight that holds full traceability between requirement, decision, and cost.
Building management systems, IoT sensors, occupancy and utilization analytics, digital twins, predictive maintenance, and energy optimization, as the concrete form of technology-enabled facilities. Where a campus needs its own wireless to carry all of it, we hold the CBRS and FCC Part 96 certification to plan and install it, and the approach draws on MIT training in smart-building and sustainability technology.
Energy strategy and sustainability worked into the operating plan rather than bolted on, from procurement through measurement, where the savings and the carbon usually move together.
The workplace planned around what the people and the systems will actually need over the life of the lease, not around this year's fashion. The wires and the walls have to agree with each other.
Integrated-facilities-management partners held to their service levels, and operating and capital budgets built on real business cases, including lease versus buy.
Described without naming clients. Confidentiality is part of what senior advisory work is for.
A renovation is also a network design. A new site is also a carrier and data center decision. When the work crosses that line, the Technology practice is already on it, working from the same plan.