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6.5.2000
Managedops.com Cuts The Ribbon On Its New, $12 Million Headquarters In Bedford, N.H.
By John Fahey
BEDFORD, NH- ManagedOps.com cuts the ribbon on its new, $12 million headquarters in Bedford Friday. Dan Taylor, founder, president and chief executive of the company, said the offices provide 21st century technology housed in a building that reflects greater Manchester's millyard heritage.
ManagedOps.com, formerly The Taylor Group, is an applications service provider that manages accounting, Internet and other software operations for customers with revenues of between $10 million and $250 million.
The three-story building has a brick exterior, a central atrium, skylights and operable windows. It sits on a 9-acre site at 8 Commerce Drive, two miles south of the intersection of Interstate 293 and state Route 3. Right now it houses the operations of 180 employees, but has room for more than 400. Taylor said he thinks the building will reach capacity in the next 18 to 24 months. ManagedOps.com moved from a building adjacent to its current site, leaving behind all but 3,000 square feet of the 25,000 square feet it leased. "We built a building that would be a great place for people to work," Taylor said. "The intent was to make sure this building fit in with the culture of the state. We didn't want just another suburban office building."
Besides its brick exterior and exposed interior beams, it features custom woven textile hangings by local artists and photos from the Amoskeag Millyards, provided by the Manchester Historic Association. It also has rooms named for individual Amoskeag mill buildings - Stark I and Stark 2, Langdon and Waumbec among them. One wing holds a conference area and training facility that seats 80 people and features an Internet hookup for each one. The central skylight, Taylor said, "was meant to bring light through the center of the building and into the pods where team members gather." There are plenty of other windows, too, reminiscent of mill buildings that were constructed to rely on natural light in the days before electricity. ManagedOps employees, whom Taylor calls team members, had lots of input into the design and asked not only for natural light but windows that open. The building also will offer food service.
Taylor said designers took extra care to make sure that the systems inside have multiple backups. He said that was essential for a company that runs entire systems - accounting, purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, shop floor systems and Web sites for clients around the world. "We call it a 'belt and suspenders, approach. We built it so there is no single point of failure," Taylor said. Fiber-optic lines run in opposite directions to central telephone offices in Manchester and Merrimack so damage to one will not stop service. Power lines feed the site from two sub-grids, and are backed by an uninterruptible power supply system plus an emergency generator and battery-power backup. The air conditioning and fire suppression systems also have redundant backups, he said. Floors in some sections are raised up three feet so that wiring and other systems can easily run beneath them and throughout the building. Customers and partners who visit the building can see engineers working on software and entire computer systems through glass partitions.
The network operations center is called "Houston control" for the company's Internet business," Taylor said. "People can get a peek at how we manage the business."
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