LightSpeed Shifts Focus of Gateway Center
Repositions Miami project as 'mission critical office space'

July 11, 2001 -- LightSpeed Infrastructure today said it was repositioning its Gateway Center in Miami as a "mission critical office space" facility, and will market the building to a broad spectrum of data-intensive business tenants.
LightSpeed Gateway Center had initially been planned as an information technology/telecom facility. The switch was driven by two trends - the slowdown in the telecom market, and growing interest in mission-critical infrastructure among non-telco businesses, according to LightSpeed.
"We believe Mission Critical Office Space provides the best of all worlds within a single facility," said Michael Swerdlow, Chairman and Chief Executive of LightSpeed Infrastructure and Swerdlow Real Estate Group. "As businesses place greater reliance on technology, the costs and risks associated with that technology becoming unavailable increase exponentially.
"Businesses are now looking for ways to cost-effectively increase reliability, and these facilities will provide the fail-safe environment to attract the critical mass and economies of scale necessary to make that possible," Swerdlow added.
Target tenants will cross the entire business spectrum including law firms, medical, accounting, financial services and technology firms. In recent months, numerous buildings initially targeted for telecom and data center use have begun courting these tenants.
These efforts have been helped by rolling brownouts in California, which are spurring businesses nationwide to seek ways to protect their operations from similar problems, due to either natural disasters or instability in energy markets.
The LightSpeed Mission Critical Gateway Center will have a 25,000 square foot hurricane-proof concrete bunker containing a raised-floor data center for hosting sensitive electronic equipment and documents. The facility will be served by dual power grids and multiple fiber providers, centralized meet-me-rooms and back-up generators
The building will also have 275,000 square feet of office space, and feature amenities including videoconference rooms, high-tech training and meeting facilities, an "office colony" offering shared office space, and a health club.
Similar space will also be incorporated into a portion of LightSpeed Fort Lauderdale Center, a facility currently in the planning stages in Cypress Creek, a sub-market of Fort Lauderdale.
Hollywood, Fla.-based LightSpeed Infrastructure is controlled by Swerdlow Real Estate Group. The firm has strategic alliances with various high-tech manufacturers, infrastructure providers and prominent institutional investors.