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Parsippany building to house HSBC's data center operations
Planning board approves changes by banking giant to former Medco facility
BY TIM O'REILEY DAILY RECORD
PARSIPPANY -- What was a major mail-order pharmacy that employed 1,500 people at its peak will be transformed into bank backup data center needing only about 100 attendants.
HSBC Holdings, the London-based banking giant with $1.5 trillion in assets, received town planning board approval Tuesday to make several modifications to the 177,000-square-foot building vacated by Medco Health Solutions in 2004.
The changes include ripping out almost all of the parking and constructing a 46,800-square-foot addition.
HSBC would install rows of servers and mainframe computers primarily as its disaster-recovery center and also for processing credit card transactions, according to the application filed by the company.
HSBC spokesman Stephen Cohen confirmed the bank's move but did not disclose the budget or how much the bank is paying for the buildings and the 22-acre site. Nor did he have a timetable for construction and moving in.
Major financial-service companies, particularly stock brokerages based in Manhattan, have maintained backup data centers and even trading floors in remote locations.
Emergency facilities gained more urgency after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with the Federal Reserve Board ordering its member banks to submit detailed disaster plans.
In 2002, for example, Deutsche Bank leased space in another part of Parsippany for a data center. The one it housed in a high-rise in lower Manhattan was damaged badly by the collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Center.
Reflecting the changes in use of the former Medco building, HSBC will surround it with a 10-foot-high security fence and create a berm along the part of the property abutting Jefferson Road.
What is now the parking lot will be left as an open field, to be used for parking buses ferrying in employees if the backup center has to be activated.
Medco cleared out of the building as its lease expired in 2004, laying off most of the 900 people who worked there at the time as part of a general consolidation of facilities.
At its peak
At its peak in 2002, Medco had slightly more than 1,500 pharmacists and pharmacy technicians at the site filling prescription orders.
In mid-2005, HSBC announced a retail banking expansion into New Jersey that included a regional headquarters in Parsippany plus branches there and in Morristown.
Founded in 1865 as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., the company since has built an international branch network that includes Beneficial Finance, which was based in Morristown when it was independent.
The Medco building was purchased out of bankruptcy in 2003 by Prism Ventures in Fort Lee for $20.7 million.
One year earlier, Morristown lawyer and real-estate magnate Lawrence S. Berger had put the building into Chapter 11 proceedings as his financial problems mounted.
Parsippany building to house HSBC's data center operations
Planning board approves changes by banking giant to former Medco facility
BY TIM O'REILEY DAILY RECORD
PARSIPPANY -- What was a major mail-order pharmacy that employed 1,500 people at its peak will be transformed into bank backup data center needing only about 100 attendants.
HSBC Holdings, the London-based banking giant with $1.5 trillion in assets, received town planning board approval Tuesday to make several modifications to the 177,000-square-foot building vacated by Medco Health Solutions in 2004.
The changes include ripping out almost all of the parking and constructing a 46,800-square-foot addition.
HSBC would install rows of servers and mainframe computers primarily as its disaster-recovery center and also for processing credit card transactions, according to the application filed by the company.
HSBC spokesman Stephen Cohen confirmed the bank's move but did not disclose the budget or how much the bank is paying for the buildings and the 22-acre site. Nor did he have a timetable for construction and moving in.
Major financial-service companies, particularly stock brokerages based in Manhattan, have maintained backup data centers and even trading floors in remote locations.
Emergency facilities gained more urgency after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with the Federal Reserve Board ordering its member banks to submit detailed disaster plans.
In 2002, for example, Deutsche Bank leased space in another part of Parsippany for a data center. The one it housed in a high-rise in lower Manhattan was damaged badly by the collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Center.
Reflecting the changes in use of the former Medco building, HSBC will surround it with a 10-foot-high security fence and create a berm along the part of the property abutting Jefferson Road.
What is now the parking lot will be left as an open field, to be used for parking buses ferrying in employees if the backup center has to be activated.
Medco cleared out of the building as its lease expired in 2004, laying off most of the 900 people who worked there at the time as part of a general consolidation of facilities.
At its peak
At its peak in 2002, Medco had slightly more than 1,500 pharmacists and pharmacy technicians at the site filling prescription orders.
In mid-2005, HSBC announced a retail banking expansion into New Jersey that included a regional headquarters in Parsippany plus branches there and in Morristown.
Founded in 1865 as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., the company since has built an international branch network that includes Beneficial Finance, which was based in Morristown when it was independent.
The Medco building was purchased out of bankruptcy in 2003 by Prism Ventures in Fort Lee for $20.7 million.
One year earlier, Morristown lawyer and real-estate magnate Lawrence S. Berger had put the building into Chapter 11 proceedings as his financial problems mounted.
posted by Jones Lang LaSalle NJ News Blog at 10:21 AM
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