Alticor moving its IT department

[GRDadof3]

...to Caledonia:

Alticor moving to unrivaled building - GRBJ

When I saw the title on the Business Journal's website, I thought "Downtown?!". It's too bad they're moving this out to an existing building in Caledonia (near 68th and Broadmoor), as it sounds like they were investigating building a new facility for their IT department's 60 people. I worked out in that area before and it's pretty depressing. Barely even any place to go for lunch, except Subway inside of a gas station or McDonald's in Caledonia.

[GR Pyro]

I believe this was the building built for METC before ITC bought them out almost 2 years ago. If I'm right, METC never even moved into the building...

I can't access the article, does it give more background on the building?

[Yankee Fan]

It is not going to be their entire IT department, which numbers significantly more than 60 people.

Mainly network support and infrastructure will be moving there. This facility is actually a perfect fit for those types of activities, as it was built with all of the bells and whistles you could want, like a back up disaster recovery system, walls withstanding unheard of winds, etc. This is a great move for this department, especially when you consider that these departments currently share a firewall with the aerosal department (anyone remember the fires/explosions in years past?!).

But again, this is not going to be all of their IT.

Coincidentally, I have it on good word that they are midway through their planning to consolidate all of their IT departments (ABG, Quixtar, Alticor, Amway) in to one common entity. Right now, Alticor is the main hub but most other activities in the other companies run somewhat on their own and have their own leadership hierarchies. Now when they finalize that, I will be interested to see what other announcements come out.

[GRDadof3]

I believe this was the building built for METC before ITC bought them out almost 2 years ago. If I'm right, METC never even moved into the building...

I can't access the article, does it give more background on the building?

[GR Pyro]

Yes, it is the METC building. It's built like a bunker with its own backup generators.

[GRDadof3]

Does the article mention the 20' wall made for their monitors? This building sounded like a information-warehousing dream...

[bossmanbill]

...to Caledonia:

Alticor moving to unrivaled building - GRBJ

When I saw the title on the Business Journal's website, I thought "Downtown?!". It's too bad they're moving this out to an existing building in Caledonia (near 68th and Broadmoor), as it sounds like they were investigating building a new facility for their IT department's 60 people. I worked out in that area before and it's pretty depressing. Barely even any place to go for lunch, except Subway inside of a gas station or McDonald's in Caledonia.

[JimInGR]

GR Pyro is right, it is a information-warehousing dream.

Originally when they looking at sites, I was hoping to move downtown also, but oh well.

It took us awhile to acquire the building. The plot was zoned for industrial and the township wouldn't rezone the land. We ended up convincing the township and finally got access to the building in July. The network infrastructure will be built from the ground up. Currently we are running the network cables which will take about three months. There will be 4-5 IT departments there, basically all the ones that handle data center support. All the programmers will still be in Ada. Currently we have a data center at Quixtar. That one will be shutdown and moved to Ada as a backup site. The new building is expected to be up and running be summer of '09.

We are halfway done merging the ABG & Alticor IT departments. Amway never really had an IT department. The Alticor IT handles Amway and Quixtar hasn't really merged in that much. All the merging will be completed by Feb 09, for the 50th anniversary though.