Contributed by Lonnie Emard, Executive Director of IT-oLogy
As IT-oLogy brought together business and academia, and began to look at the economic impact of information technology (IT) on the community, a message and question was brought to the table – exactly how big is the IT profession in the state of South Carolina?
When assessing the impact of the IT profession, the IT industry is the first thing looked at; more importantly, however, the profession includes not only the industry, but also the internal professionals who are the enablers of business solutions in all industry verticals – from manufacturing to insurance, retail to transportation. This clarity has been extremely important to the message of why building IT talent and applying that talent leads to economic growth.
With regard to the recent commentary about the limited scope of data centers in the state of South Carolina, once again IT-oLogy cares about the accuracy of the message being conveyed. A number of data centers, in addition to those mentioned, already exist in this state and have been highly successful because they have aligned themselves with a business need across an industry vertical like insurance, telecommunications or energy, to name a few.
Immedion has established itself as a leader in data center provisioning in South Carolina and has been a vital part of the IT-oLogy message about growing the economy with IT talent and delivering smarter, more efficient business solutions. BlueCross BlueShield of SC, located in northeast Columbia, is one of the largest data centers in the world and, while the focus is on insurance claims processing, it is the largest provider of that functionality in the country. Other companies like SCANA operate large data centers and do not outsource infrastructure because it is vital to their effective and efficient delivery of IT to both internal and external customers. While there are more examples like this, IT-oLogy wants to collaborate on supporting the right legislation that fuels growth and respectfully honors the tremendous assets that we already have in the state of South Carolina.