By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

Google hopes to add its new Berkeley County data center to its global facilities network by this summer, and will ramp up with local hires and current employees from its other U.S. sites, a company executive said earlier this month.

Matt Dunne, Google’s community relations manager, also said the new facility will play a key role in advancing an important new type of collaborative technology. Dunne spoke April 3 to a group of more than 200 at the Charleston Regional Business Journal’s Power Breakfast Series at Trident Technical College.

“Existing Google employees were given first preference of jobs at the new data center, and Charleston is a very desirable place to live,” Dunne said. “As a result, we had a huge number of people who chose to transfer.

“That said, we’ve placed an emphasis on hiring locally because it’s not only good for business but good for the community, our new neighbors, as a whole.”

The company has come up with an incentive to encourage employees to buy homes in either Moncks Corner or Goose Creek. For employees who have transferred from other company sites, Google has also prepared a list of preferred real estate agents who have a physical presence in Berkeley County, Dunne said.

“We don’t tell them who to use, but we certainly are trying to create an opportunity for Berkeley County-based Realtors to benefit from that business,” he said.

Much of Dunne’s presentation to local business executives at the College Center at Trident Technical College’s Complex for Economic Development focused not on the local data center but on “The Importance of Being Googley.”

He touched on the history of Google. Its founders “liberated” used computers while at Stanford University to further their goal of downloading the entire Internet and celebrated their first infusion of cash from a venture capitalist with a dinner at Burger King.

Dunne also revealed that the colors used in the company’s logo are actually an homage to Legos, which were used to prop up the company’s first few servers.

From such humble beginnings, Dunne said, Google has grown to be the Internet’s No. 1 search portal, with 5.3 billion page views per day. It’s also grown from being a partnership of two guys in a dorm room to a worldwide company with more than 16,000 employees in just nine years.

Focus on technology, innovation

To sustain growth and continue to ride a wave of innovation, Google focuses on technology and innovation, maintaining scale — of which the creation of the Berkeley County data center was part — advancing its brand and fostering its culture.

“Google products reflect our culture. We’re a flat organization, meaning new ideas can come from anywhere and are not simply directed from the top down. We’re risk tolerant. We like things to be fast and scalable, and we don’t hold a negative view on things being done differently than they have in the past — we consider that an exciting challenge.”

Berkeley County’s data center will be a key component in advancing what Google and others have called “cloud computing,” Dunne said.

“Data centers make it possible to store a tremendous amount of information in one place, allowing applications to be built off the cloud — off the Internet — rather than relying on your own computer capacity or platform,” he said.

A recurring theme during Dunne’s presentation and afterward was that Berkeley County had “stepped up to the plate” and as far as Google was concerned the county and its leadership were owed a debt of gratitude and loyalty.

“There were a lot of places where Google could have put a data center, but the political leadership here and the economic development leadership here was second to none,” he said.

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@scbiznews.com.

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