ohn Lucas, director of global real estate for Juniper Networks, a leading developer of high-performance Internet protocol platforms, oversees a far-flung worldwide portfolio of about 1 million sq. ft. (92,900 sq. m.). Locations range from the company’s 675,000-sq.-ft. (62,700-sq.-m.) Sunnyvale, Calif., corporate campus to much smaller offices around the globe.
One of the biggest real estate challenges in overseeing a portfolio of this magnitude is efficiently managing the space needs of the company’s 3,500 employees.
Juniper uses CenterStone Software’s (www.centerstonesoft.com) eCenterOne Web-based platform for several functions, including space management. Lucas says eCenterOne is particularly useful in helping the real estate side keep track of the space requirements created by the ebb and flow of employees due to acquisitions, attrition and movement within the company.
“We engage eCenterOne in a number of ways,” Lucas says. “One of our highest priorities is to make sure the footprint of our real estate portfolio operates as efficiently as possible. This involves keeping track of employees as they leave or move from one place to another. Our move process incorporates eCenterOne and all the move planning is done in eCenterOne.”
Lucas is a long-time fan of eCenterOne going back to his previous job, a similar position with PeopleSoft. He says Juniper is now trying to establish direct communication between its eCenterOne database and its PeopleSoft human resources database.
“In the near future we will be able to populate our PeopleSoft database with the new locations of employees,” he says. “Historically, there’s been a disconnect between the human resources database and where the facilities database says they are.”
Earnings Point Back to Process
Ross Leibowitz, CenterStone’s chief technology officer, says his company’s product serves three constituencies: real estate professionals, the executives they report to and, finally, general employees.
“Real estate affects earnings per share and managing it effectively can impact earnings,” Leibowitz says. “Our clients are constantly interacting with their service providers and they need a way to get that data — eCenterOne allows everyone to collaborate.”
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Liebowitz says one of eCenterOne’s strengths is space allocation and moving logistics within a company.
“Say John Smith wants to move to a particular office. You have IT involved, telecom involved, a vendor picking up and moving him. You have all types of processes coming together. Our work flow allows us to automate these processes and ensures the process is repeated over and over. That’s an important part of best practices. It allows us to measure processes.”
Liebowitz says eCenterOne allows clients to look at lease information and be able to charge back the cost to each line of business occupying that space.
“Charge-back mechanisms are becoming more and more important,” he says. “Our clients are usually very large companies with many lines of business and it’s important for them to be able to allocate these costs properly. All of our large clients are using eCenterOne to do a very complex form of cost allocations.”
Clients use eCenterOne on an annual subscription basis. Liebowitz says CenterStone will continue to examine the financial aspects of the corporate real estate world as it strives to develop more robust forecasting and benchmarking capabilities.
“We try to give clients the capabilities to solve problems the way they want to,” Liebowitz says. “We’ll work with you on best practices, but we won’t force a particular way to do it.”