Scoblick says more than 35,000 sf of leases are pending for high-tech clients of Cushman and Wakefield within Houston limits. FimLogic, Agilent and Halo Industries are just a few of the C&W clients awaiting space. There also is the opening of Insignia's Houston Telecom Exchange, Metro Nexus telecom hotel and the coming of Infomart's telecommunications campus space as further evidence of the city's impending technical evolution.

In part, the demand is fueled by bandwidth commodity trading and the upcoming potential of data storage commodity trading industries, Scoblick says of Houston's technical transformation. Companies like Enron, Dynegy, Koch, El Paso Energy, Reliant Energy and Duke Energy make up just a fraction of the robust commodities trading industry.

Scoblick believes Houston will be a successful high-tech center because the deep pockets of the old economy's energy industry are underwriting the firms coming to market. "One other asset that the Houston energy companies are leveraging in their bandwidth trading operations is their existing natural gas pipeline right of ways," says Scoblick. "Some of the companies own thousands of miles of pipelines crisscrossing the country and connecting many of the major metropolitan cities. In certain parts of the country these companies are using these existing gas pipeline right of ways, similar to the railroad right of ways, to lay their fiber-optic cable in support of their national bandwidth trading platform."