Information Technology

Greater St. Louis has exceptional telecommunications infrastructure and resources including Internet backbone and fiber capacity from national and regional carriers.  this infrastructure, coupled with our significant regional IT talent and corporate resources, make St. Louis a very attractive data center market.  The area's exceptionally low electricity costs and IT wages make regional data center operations even more profitable

Greater St. Louis' telecom industry is only part of its strength as a center for information technology.  There are over 40,000 computer and mathematical workers in Greater St. Louis in 2009, 26% higher than national averages.  Yet, these workers' average wages are 93% of U.S. levels making St. Louis an attractive IT labor market for business.

Here are some examples of IT entrepreneurship and innovation in the St. Louis area:

• World Wide Technology was founded in 1990 with seven employees and a shoestring budget.  Now the systems integrator has 750 local employees and revenues over $3 billion.



• Thomson Reuters, the international provider of financial data, has established St. Louis as one of its four worldwide software “development centers.” The others are in London, Paris, and Bangkok. In addition, it has consolidated its American customer relationship management center here, migrating people and assets from both Long Island and Chicago.


• International Data Corporation (IDC) ranks St. Louis-based SAVVIS Inc. as the second-largest provider of hosting services and second-largest provider of virtual private network service. SAVVIS focuses on high-performance, high-quality IT solutions for businesses in the financial, media and entertainment, publishing, retail, corporate marketing, and creative services industries.


• Much of the IT expertise in St. Louis resides within companies that consume rather than produce the technology. For example, the MasterCard Global Operations and Technology Center in O’Fallon, Mo., employs more than 1,700 in the processing of up to 40 million credit card authorizations a day and in providing other IT services for card-issuing financial institutions and more than 23 million merchants. Other companies, such as Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Emerson, Anheuser-Busch, and Boeing employ leading edge technology to improve operations.


• In the 2010 version of its "100 Best Places to Work in IT," Computerworld included 4 St. Louis area companies in the top 50.  Those companies were Scottrade (21^st), National Information Solutions Cooperative (22^nd), Express Scripts Inc. (44^th), and Edward Jones (45^th).