Richard Zack of Pantek

Though I'd heard of Richard before (he's senior manager at Pantek which is, after all, Cleveland's premier provider of open source solutions AKA Linux), the first time I met him was at one of the "Tech Czar's" infamous gatherings. This one took place at the Happy Dog. We arranged a tour of their hosting facilities and for coffee afterwards.

George Nemeth: Richard, we were just over visiting your data center and you mentioned to me that you had moved the data center from Solon, downtown. Could you explain that again for me?

Richard Zack: Yes, no problem. We started our company in Solon. Solon’s a really great city, I think, to get a business started, because there’s a wealth of resources in a very close area. There’s free parking. There’s an OfficeMax. There are restaurants everywhere. It’s easily accessible on the freeway. So Solon was a really great place to start a small company, especially one without a whole lot of initial funding, like we did. However, the one thing that Solon is really lacking when you compare it to downtown is the Internet data centers. In Cleveland, there are several large enterprise class Internet data centers to choose from (I think there are five or six on Euclid Avenue alone), and so when our business got to the point where having an extremely fast and reliable Internet facility and Internet connection, when that became required, we really, it was really just an easy decision to come downtown, but also always kind of wanted to move downtown. There is a lot of notoriety I think in having a downtown office, and as far as attracting people and having the kind of notoriety of that. But so back in 2004, we moved our office and we moved all of our equipment downtown. We moved into the Broad Wing facility in the Halle Building, and it’s just a fantastic facility, as you saw, so we’ve been very happy here.

I wanted to ask you about the growth, too, because you had said that there were several new rows of servers in there in just a year that you’ve been in that facility. Since the IdeaCenter has been working and there are technology companies going in there all the time, what’s going on with the technology scene here in Northeast Ohio? Is it really experiencing a growth or a comeback, or how would you describe it?

Oh absolutely. I mean there have been at least three or four new rows of cabinets in that facility, which account for hundreds and hundreds of servers that have been added just in the last year, and that’s only in one facility. However, due to the nature of the work we do, we work on a lot of servers for a lot of people. At Pantek we do a lot of server administration and integration work, and in every facility that we’ve been in, we have seen a huge growth in servers being posted there and a huge growth in Internet traffic. Also, in the two years since I’ve lived downtown, and lived and worked downtown, actually moved, and moved my office and my apartment to downtown Cleveland on the same day…

<laughter> That’s a lot of work.

…in the same truck. Got a discount from the movers for doing them both at the same time. But since I’ve been here, there’s clearly been a growth in technology companies. There’s clearly a really good foundation for technology companies moving here, because of all the facilities, the infrastructure, and the people working downtown. I mean there’s just been a huge growth, and I’ve got to tell you, I give a lot of credit to Michael DeAloia for that. I mean Michael was very important in moving us downtown and in a lot of the other companies that I know that have moved downtown, his involvement has been crucial. I can’t speak highly enough for his efforts and just his passion to get people down here. So I think there’s a probably a combination of factors. You have an environment in downtown Cleveland which is very conducive for technology companies and Internet focused companies, especially, to do business. You have some passionate leadership bringing people down here, and I think you also have a surge from the Dot Com burst back in 2000, when sort of the bubble popped and sort of everything kind of shrunk down. I think it was inevitable that after a few years of a lull there’d be a rise, and I think we’re clearly in the midst of that rise and I think that it’s just going to keep getting better from here on.

I want to come back to that, because I want to talk about Open Source Technology. I want to ask you what your experience living downtown is like. I spent a lot of time downtown. It seems like there is a lot of vibrancy here, there are a lot of neat things, there are a lot of younger people that are moving back; if you could comment on that.

Sure. Well actually I do have a lot to say about that, so I’ll comment, if you want me to go in that direction. Living downtown is absolutely fantastic during the day, and there certainly has been a surge in younger people moving downtown in the two years that I’ve been here, and I do love living downtown. It’s a great place to live and to work. But then some time around 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, most of the people that come into the city during the day are gone, they start leaving, places start closing, and I have had some trouble with some of the basic things, like grocery stores, convenience stores, places to go to eat that aren’t $300 a plate or whatever it is over on West 6th, and there’s sort of an element of that missing. I mean it’s even reflected in the lack of fast food restaurants downtown. There are about five Subways, but the McDonalds and the Burger King and the other restaurants are so far away from central downtown, you can’t walk to them, so that kind of takes away, I think, even from “Hey, I just want to get a hamburger.” So I have had a problem with grocery shopping and sort of some of the basic kind of stuff. You know, you run out of toilet paper at 3:00 in the night, what do you do, right?

Right.

So I’ve actually done the majority of my grocery shopping, the majority of buying kind of items goes to the suburbs, because I work 8AM-9PM and then everything’s closed and so I have to go to the 24-hour Wal-Mart down in Brook Park or in Lakewood, because those are the only places that are open. So if there was one thing, if there were a few things that I would really love to see downtown would be, as cheesy as it sounds, I really would like more fast food restaurants. I think that would actually be conducive to having people kind of stick in downtown once they’re here, and I’d like to see some kind of a 24-hour Wal-Mart or Target or K-Mart, or some kind of a 24-hour store where people who live downtown can go. That’s the biggest complaint of any of the friends that I have downtown, as well as after about 7:00 you’d better be stocked up on anything you’d need. Now you can contrast that to New York.

And I’m glad you went there, because I know you travel back and forth. What’s the difference? What’s similar and what’s different about Cleveland and New York?

Okay. Well one of the biggest things that’s different is in Brooklyn, where I have an apartment, in Brooklyn at any time in the day or night, you’re really only two or three blocks away from anything you need, as far as grocery stores, convenience stores, food, drinks. Anything you need is only a few blocks away. I have an apartment in a fairly safe neighborhood called Park Slope. It’s a lot more concentrated of an area, and I think what also is different with that is there really aren’t huge mega superstores in that part of town. Certainly if you go to Manhattan and Times Square, there are these big mega 24-hour stores. But within a few blocks in Brooklyn, there is no big 24-hour K-Mart, there is no big 24-hour Wal-Mart, but there are dozens of these little kind of stores that have been around I’m sure for generations, and it’s much more of a community type feeling when you’re living out there. Now the similarities… Well another difference is certainly cost. It’s significantly more expensive in Brooklyn. A similar apartment from where I live in Cleveland to Brooklyn, a similar apartment would be about triple the price, and that’s just Brooklyn, which is considered a suburb of the city. In Manhattan, it could be four or five times the price for a two-bedroom two-bathroom. You’re looking at $4,000 or $5,000 a month, if you want to be in a safe neighborhood. So it is significantly more expensive, which is definitely a downer, especially when you’re trying to start a business. I don’t think starting a new business in New York City is possible without significant kind of funding or significant existing client base perhaps. You have to have resources, I mean, because if you’re paying for rent, it’s ridiculous, and people’s living expenses and employing a staff of people becomes incredibly expensive in the city. So I think the potential to start new businesses in New York is basically only limited to those individuals, those entrepreneurs that have access to investment funding, to significant resources. In Cleveland, even in downtown Cleveland, I think it’s possible to start an amazing tech company without having somebody hand you a $100,000 or a million dollar check. I think in Cleveland it’s a lot easier and a lot more possible to really get innovative ideas off the ground. And I know that’s interesting. I have a lot to say on this.

Go right ahead.

So it’s interesting, because it’s a lot easier. I think it’s a lot easier and it’s a lot better for people to try to start their business in the Cleveland area, but on the down side, I’ve seen a lot less people who want to start those type of things in the Cleveland area. New York seems to have this very creative entrepreneurial spirit about it. Everybody’s an entrepreneur in New York, and in Cleveland it’s not quite the case. I think New York has kind of an international renown, and when people graduate college in areas in the country, a lot of them say, “Well where do I want to move? What are the top three places?” Well New York, L.A., Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago. I mean there are these big cities, and what I’m hoping will happen in Cleveland is that people will add Cleveland to that list, to that list of places, and I really think we need more. We need to do whatever it’s going to take to get more talented young people to move to the City of Cleveland, and the silly little things, like not having a 24-hour grocery store, do matter.

I want to get real specific about that, because you’re talking about technology companies, and you’re an Open Source Technology company.

Yes.

'''Where did your engineers come from? Were they people locally? Is it to a point where you have to attract people who work on Red Hat systems to Cleveland, or can you do it virtually, or how does that work?

Well that’s a good question. We do a lot with Open Source Software, because I think it really fosters innovation. You have access to all the information. You have access to all the behind-the-scenes stuff. And if you’re not an engineer, you may not care about that, but as an engineer, it’s an incredible tool for E-commerce and I think it’s established itself in our society and it’s going to be around for decades to come.

It’s growing, too. I mean it’s not going away any time soon. You probably have more and more clients that are coming to you saying, “Hey, this is what we want to do,” and when you recommend Open Source, they’re like, “Yeah, okay. Cool. It’s Linux. I know about that.”

Absolutely. I mean when we first started, the server market in the United States, when we first started back in like ’99, it was about 12% or 13% of the servers were running Linux. Now it’s 25%, and it’s expected to reach 30% to 33% in the next two years. And that may not sound like a lot, but when you’re talking about 60 to 70 million servers in the United States, it’s a significant number of systems. However, what we found, which was really kind of interesting was it was kind of a blessing and a curse in the Cleveland area when it comes to Open Source Software. Open Source Software has not rapidly been embraced by the large organizations in Cleveland, but what we found is that it has been embraced by the technology community here, and there’s a huge technology community, and especially and Open Source and a Linux community that’s very active in Linux and Open Source. They love it. They’ve been preaching for years to their companies, “Hey, we need to get Linux and Open Source here.” A lot of times they just put it in and don’t tell anybody, because it just works. And then when these bright minds, these people that have the Open Source expertise and the Open Source passion, a lot of times they meet with resistance from their employers about introducing it in their organization, and then they start looking for local companies who have embraced it. So we have been able to find, through being known as an Open Source leader in the community, a good pool of talent to work on our Open Source Software, and now that companies are kind of slowly more and more adopting Linux and Open Source in their organizations, it’s kind of coming around to us, where now before, five years ago, talking to a big company about replacing their Novell or their unit systems with Linux, that was a very difficult task. Now they’re just coming to us and asking us what it will take. I think that’s a huge swing.

That’s a great position to be in.

Yes.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

From Cool Cleveland's Information Officer George Nemeth georgeATcoolcleveland.com (:divend:)