September 30, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Alcon, a unit of Switzerland-based Novartis , opened the doors of its global data center in Forth Worth, Texas on Tuesday.
The facility, which cost $53 million, is 37,000 square feet, the fourth of Novartis’s data centers to open worldwide. It opened with 10,000 square feet of IT space, and can be expanded to 35,000.
Alcon manufactures drugs, contact lenses and surgical equipment. It employs approximately 4,400 people in Forth Worth, about 40 of whom will work at the new data center.
The new data center is in Alcon’s campus headquarters. Novartis’s other data centers are located in Basel, Switzerland, East Hanover, NJ, and Stein, Switzerland.
The facility was designed as an environmentally sustainable building with the intention of cutting emissions and limiting energy and water consumption. It utilizes energy efficient cooling technology, pretty much a necessity in Texas, intelligent low-voltage LED lighting, solar PV panel system that provides 100 Kw power for administrative areas, and storm water collection and rain harvesting.
“Novartis is committed to achieving LEED Silver and ASHRAE Energy Standards throughout its campuses worldwide,” said Scott Owen Mason, Novartis’s chief technology officer, in a statement. “Our commitment to environmental responsibility is good for the planet and our business, and importantly, the Forth Worth community.”
In 2014, the city of Fort Worth granted the Alcon campus a reinvestment zone status, which provided an 80 percent abatement on incremental real and personal property taxes for 10 years.
Alcon indicated that Forth Worth was chosen over other possible sites, both in the U.S. and globally, because of security issues related to the Alcon campus, and strong partnerships with area contracts, suppliers, and the city of Forth Worth.
Forth Worth Mayor Betsy Price noted that Facebook had also chosen a site for a data center in Forth Worth. The city, she said, “is becoming quite a data center.”
Alcon’s big news this year was a deal first announced in January to work with Google on its smart contact lens that is capable of monitoring glucose levels in diabetes patients. The technology may also have the ability to automatically adjust to some vision problems.
As Novartis described in a press statement, “For people living with presbyopia who can no longer read without glasses, the ‘smart lens’ has the potential to provide accommodative vision correction to help restore the eye’s natural autofocus on near objects in the form of an accommodative contact lens or intraocular lens as part of the refractive cataract treatment.”
Novartis, Alcon’s parent company, also announced today Novartis Access, which is a social business model that provides a portfolio of 15 on-patent and off-patent drugs for $1 per treatment per month to patients in poorer countries, dubbed low- and low-to middle-income countries. The drugs were chosen on the basis of a list of essential medicines created by the World Health Organization. The 15 drugs are for the top seven causes of death in these parts of the world, including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, respiratory illnesses and cancer.
“The business world is well aware of the immense opportunities in developing markets, but it is also our responsibility to recognize and address critical social and health issues that impede progress,” wrote Novartis’s chief executive officer, Joseph Jimenez, in Forbes. “I believe that a commercially sustainable, social business approach can together with all stakeholders make a powerful long-term impact for the people who need it.”
