Industry News

Deere & Co., based in Moline, Ill., has expanded plans for its 65-acre campus in Cary to accommodate as many as 2,000 employees in four 160,000-sf buildings. It will serve as headquarters for John Deere Worldwide Commercial and Consumer Equipment Division, accommodating 500 employees when completed in October 2001. The new master plan calls for three additional buildings of the same size, which may be built over a ten-year period. Deere manufactures farm and lawn equipment.

Sycamore Networks is proposing a new $120 million corporate campus in Tyngsborough. The eight-building, 926,500-sf project is planned to accommodate 661,500 sf for R&D housed in four buildings; a 200,000-sf corporate headquarters; a 50,000-sf center for customer care; a 10,000-sf daycare center; and a wellness center that will occupy 5,000 sf. Phase I construction is scheduled for completion in 2002, with full build-out in 2005. The associated parking areas, utilities, driveways, and drainage are included in the project.

Hyseq, a "dry" biotech firm in the Silicon Valley known for its computer modeling in the field of genomics, is building a new 139,000-sf wet lab in a converted office building near the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. The facility will be used to develop drugs and conduct biological testing. Completioin is scheduled for mid-2002.

Navy Marine Corps.' Intranet network operations center at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego is nearing completion. A total of six such centers are planned for the network, with a second one to be built in Hawaii. The center project, which will link all Navy and Marine land facilities in the continental U.S., is headed by a consortium of private companies called the Information Strike Force, lead by Electronic Data Services Corp. of Plano, Texas.

XO Communications Inc. is considering the construction of a 300,000-sf building at a 40-acre site in Richardson to consolidate its 1,500 Dallas-area employees. The project would include a large regional training center as well as an 80,000-sf data center to accommodate Web hosting, server management, collocation, and related services. XO is working with The Staubach Co. on the potential consolidation.