ST. PAUL – City officials see plans to create a high- tech center here.Downtown St. Paul’s efforts to become a center forhigh-tech companies seems to be bearing fruit, as the second high-tech tenant in a week announced plans to take a significant lease there.Guardent Inc., a Boston-based digital securityservices provider, says it plans to move the 25employees of its fast-growing Midwest office into the fifth floor of Lawson Commons in downtown St. Paul.

Just a week earlier, Cisco Systems said it would move its fast-growing optical Internet-working business unit to a 26,000-sf lease in the Hamm Building, which is near Lawson Commons.Although the fifth floor on Lawson Commons had been designed for a single tenant, it will broken up into multitenant space to accommodate Guardent, says Rob Kost, the United Properties agent who brokered the deal. Guardent is leasing 9,000 sf of office space,less than a third of the size of a typical floor.

City officials expected that the City’s hefty subsidies to facilitate the relocation of Lawson Software from Minneapolis to a new office building in downtown St. Paul would attract other high-tech companies to thearea. The 370,000-sf Lawson Commons opened late last year.St. Paul’s growing tech sector, which also includes a variety of high tech start-ups and Internet companiesin its Lowertown district, was indeed an incentive for Guardent to move there, says John Sekevitch, vice president and general manager of Guardent.The growing number of restaurants and entertainmentoptions, including a new Science Museum and aprofessional hockey team debuting this fall indowntown St. Paul, is another reason Guardent chose Lawson.

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