Patrick Kennedy, CEO of OSIsoft, is linking San Leandro to the world this first quarter of 2012 through high-speed optic fiber, which the city claims will bring new high tech industry into the city’s industrial fold.

“We are very optimistic for what this can do,” said Jeff Kay, business development analyst for City of San Leandro. “We want to control our expectations a little bit but it can be a tool to help attract new businesses and keep the businesses we already have here growing. We are excited for the potential it brings.”

Cynthia Battenberg, business development manager for the City of San Leandro, agrees with Kennedy, emphasizing San Leandro’s geographic advantage and henceforth its unique opportunity in the Bay Area.

“We have seen a decline in industrial land in the Bay Area but in San Leandro we retained 90 percent of our industrial land, so there is a real support for businesses to move in,” explained Battenburg.

San Leandro’s unemployment rating was recorded at a 9.9 percent in October, a decrease from the previous month and the first time it has been below 10 percent since April 2009. San Leandro’s unemployment rating remains a step ahead of California’s 11.2 percent rating, and Kay believes that Kennedy’s fiber optics can help retain this lead.

Kennedy lists many industries, such as teleconference studios, genomic services and private clouds to service industries such as gaming,
architects, design firms and video editing, as only a small portion of the many industries for San Leandro to expand economic growth.

Kennedy believes his system could be an important facilitation to economic growth, placing an emphasis on manufacturing.

“I believe that building manufacturing design to work within the digital era is the only way to build back the employment in the current economic environment,” said Kennedy.

“We can not give up on manufacturing,” continued Kennedy. “It is such a huge job creator in the U.S that it will always be one of our largest job creators. Some sort of goods has to be exported from San Leandro to bring money to San Leandro.”

Kennedy is referring to industries that can be tapped with a high speed communication network like hybrid manufacturing, which Kennedy exclaims could be an early adopter of his system.

“I predict that one of the early adopters will be hybrid manufacturing that ‘wrap the steel’ in areas of low cost labor, but bring the partial assembly to the US for the addition of sophisticated electronics, computers, and the ‘all glass’ dashboards,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy says that if one wanted to create jobs that give space to people to work beside the graduate software producers, then one can create an assembly line that needs skilled manual labor. Fiber optics, Kennedy points out, will invite industries to make these new assembly lines a reality in the digital age.

Fiber optics is a flexible, transparent fiberglass typically used in high-capacity communications, which allows transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths, according to Kennedy’s blog.

Kennedy aims to “light up San Leandro” with his new optical fiber system that industries can tap into.

The fiber optic installation will be headed and overseen by two companies Kennedy developed for the project: Lit San Leandro and San Leandro Dark Fiber.

The entire project will be paid for by Lit San Leandro and will provide 10 percent of the optical fiber to the City of San Leandro to help broaden broadband services for the community and facilitate an expansion of the city’s internal communications.

The project will be relatively cost effective, according to Kennedy, because the conduit is pre-existing.

The fiber system will connect to the outside world via leased fiber lines by BART’s telecommunications division. Businesses will be able to utilize the fiber lines to connect to external services like data centers, hubs and other offices at high speeds.

The resolution to lease conduit use to Patrick Kennedy to run fiber optics through came last October when the city unanimously approved Kennedy’s project.

Kennedy said while he started speaking with industries in November, no customers have been set yet for Kennedy’s optical fiber system other than his own company, OSIsoft.

Nevertheless, he will be running broker courses with city officials in February to train brokers on how to recognize companies that could benefit from private fiber fabric.

Kennedy emphasizes his commitment to San Leandro because it gave him a place to build his businesses and he owes his city something in return. In this sense, fiber optics is Kennedy’s return to San Leandro.