Meet a Member – James S. Coe, PE, ATD, RCDD
Senior Principal / Director of Critical Facilities
Syska Hennessy Group

James S. Coe, PE, ATD, RCDD is Syska’s Critical Facilities Director. He has over 30 years of experience in Engineering Operations, Project Management, and Design. His experience is focused on providing consulting, design, reliability assessments, and commissioning for Mission Critical Facilities. He is highly regarded by his many clients including AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron, Cisco, Cleveland Clinic, Delta Airlines, Duke Energy, the FBI, General Electric, General Motors, Home Depot, IBM, Marriott, Oracle, PNC Bank, Sprint, United Parcel Service, Verizon Wireless, Yahoo, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and the US Navy.

James is a Professional Engineer (PE) registered in 41 US States, a Registered Communications Distribution Designer (RCDD), and an Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Designer.

He leads a team of 150 Professionals in the Practice of Data Center and Critical Facility Design, Consulting, and Commissioning.

James previously served in the US Navy as a Nuclear Engineer and Surface Warfare Officer. James is an Instrument-Rated Private Pilot who flies regularly.

James has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA

How He Got Involved in Mission Critical Operations

“Most of my career has been associated with Mission Critical activities. After graduating with an Electrical Engineering degree, I was trained by the US Navy on the theory and operations of Nuclear Reactors and Shipboard propulsion. Nearly every system on a US Navy vessel has redundancy and resilience. After adding an Electrical Engineering Master’s degree, I entered the Engineering industry in the mid 1990’s and experienced in short order the computer revolution, the PCS phone system expansion, and the Dot-Com infrastructure build-up.

Many of my clients were telecom companies who were expanding tremendously from all three booms. I personally enjoyed the complexities of Diesel Generators, Uninterruptible Power Supplies, Battery Strings, DC Power Plants, Static Switches, Switchgear, Redundancy, and Availability. I found Mission Critical Facilities more fulfilling than the power and lighting distribution found in typical buildings.

About two years following the near-simultaneous Bursting of the Telecom and Dot-Com Bubbles, Data Center demand began to grow again with new challenges presented with Hot and Cold Aisles, Virtualization, and new cooling technologies. Most data centers were one-of-a-kind and client’s respected engineers who could walk them through a decision process to get their company a custom data center well-suited to their specific requirements.

In parallel, the Retail and Wholesale colocation industry expanded with new challenges to standardize and reduce the cost of new data center deployment. This was shortly followed by the Cloud Computing evolution with unique, power-dense, and very large campuses. These two trends reduced the need for Enterprise Data Centers, so new skills were needed to deliver a quality engineering product efficiently.

Today, my clientele are Enterprises, Government Entities, Cloud Provider Giants, and Colocation providers (Wholesale and Retail). I strive to provide Engineering and Consulting to these diverse client sectors and propose solutions that respond to their needs within the best practices of the industry. I try to be familiar with the building drivers, cost trends and preferred solutions for these type clients and how they have evolved. I also think a lot about where the industry is going.

It has been a great ride thus far, and it is still a challenge to keep up with new ideas and technologies!”