Equally of concern is attracting qualified labor. Fairfax County, Va., just outside of Washington, D.C., has been a major beneficiary of the ASP and related Internet service provider boom, along with neighboring counties. According to Dan Gonzalez, vice president of commercial broker Staubach's Technology Practice Group, the site location needs of ASPs and ISPs are the same. AOL, the ISP giant soon to consolidate its headquarters with Time-Warner's in a planned tower in midtown Manhattan, started out near Dulles Airport where the company could access multiple power grids. PSInet and UUnet are neighbors along the Dulles Toll Road Corridor.
Some ASPs build entirely redundant data center facilities in different parts of the country.
Many run on a high level of security, with anonymous buildings, armed guards and retinal scanners. All the town seems to lack is a recognizable moniker like Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley. John Nail, a Chicago native, moved his ASP Employease from South Carolina to Atlanta, and then founded digitalBenefits, another ASP, there. Our business overhead is less than half what it would be if we were in Silicon Valley, and Atlanta's housing costs are one-fifth of Silicon Valley's. According to Darrell Glasco, vice president of economic development for the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, says that the city is reaching a critical mass where Internet, software and telecom clusters are beginning to grow exponentially.