In the movies and on TV the hero always knows the right thing to do, even when the required knowledge would seem to be just a bit outside his or her purview. It’s the cowboy who speaks the language of the tribe who steps in to turn their war party into a coffee klatch of mutual understanding between them and the settlers who are just looking for a little land of their own, or the martial arts guy who is not only able to kill and maim a bunch of nefarious henchmen but hack into the computer of the criminal mastermind to deactivate his nuclear warhead. We love these guys and we prove it every time we shell out $10 a ticket at the box office to watch them. Unfortunately, in real estate development, no one knows everything — which explains why no one makes movies about the subject. We do it for a living and even we wouldn’t pay to watch something like that — but being able to navigate through the intricacies of a local municipality to acquire and develop a site and build a data center on it is an essential requirement to meet the demands of today’s data center customers.
Timely delivery of a data center has always been an important consideration for the prospective buyer, but when your new cloud initiative turns out to be way more popular than you anticipated, you need space as quickly as possible. What this means for data center providers is that if you say that you can deliver in “x” months or less, you better be able to do it and since we’ve established that the lone hero is a foreign concept in the business, a close collaboration between the local development authority and you is a necessity. Everyone who approaches a city about a new construction project wants to complete it as quickly as possible but a tight partnership with the local development team ensures that the good people who run the various municipal departments that you need to deal with understand your project is a little more important than a new Pizza Hut.