By Wendy Anders

Yesterday Costa Rican Foreign Trade Minster Alexander Mora announced the start of $2.5 million construction on the Invenio University campus in Guanacaste that will house the Illinois, U.S.-based Continuum Data Center, LLC.

Continuum Data offers purpose built data centers and colocation solutions to businesses. Starting with a staff of 20 they plan to eventually grow to 300 at the Tilarán office which will run totally on renewable energy.

Mora began discussions to link a free trade zone in Guanacaste with a private university two years ago.

He met with the heads of Invenio University, a 320-acre corporate higher education campus in Tilarán, Guanacaste that also houses a free trade zone; and from there things started to take off.

Brainchild of Costa Rican entrepreneur Adrian Lachner, Invenio describes itself as a dual-education model used in southern Germany that blends theory and practice. On Invenio’s website, Lachner states the school’s pedagogy is based on the teachings of Father Joseph Kentenich, founder of the Schoenstatt Movement in 1914 in Germany that sought to spiritually renew the Catholic Church through strong devotion to Mary. This Roman Catholic Marian Movement is present in over 40 countries worldwide, according to Wikipedia, with a strong focus on youth and families.

According to their Facebook page, Invenio will launch classes in Jaunuary 2017 for its 4-year engineering and 2-year business degree programs. As IT teaching aids they employ the Cisco Networking Academy, a method developed by California-based Cisco, the world’s largest networking company in the world, and TechShop. Students will spend nearly half of their education in jobs at the companies housed on site such as Boston Scientific (medical device manufacturing), Florida Bebidas (beverages), FT technologies (UK-based wind sensor company), the Venezuelan National Aluminium Corporation (Alunasa), and Costa Rica’s Ad Astra Rocket company.

Lachner founded the Militant Apostolic Community, or Comunidad Apostolica Militante de Costa Rica, in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. This is a structure within the Shoenstatt Movement. He is also on the board of advisors of the British School of Costa Rica in Rohrmoser, San José.

Lachner’s business background is as founder and partner at the Costa Rica-based T.I.I. Smart Solutions, Inc, a subsidiary of Puerto Rico-based EVERTEC, Inc.. Both companies are registered in the British Virgin Islands and are listed in the Panama Papers.

According to the company’s website, “EVERTEC, Inc. is a diversified processing business, offering transaction processing, payment processing, merchant acquiring and other related services in Puerto Rico and certain countries within the Caribbean, and Central and Latin America.”

Lachner’s TII Smart Solutions offers the same services that will be offered by Continuum Data Center at Invenio’s Tilarán site, such as “point-of-sale processing, network and switch services, automated teller machine driving services, core bank processing, business process outsourcing solutions, technology infrastructure management, financial services applications and merchant acquiring services.”

EVERTEC operates in 19 countries of Latin America and processes more than 2.1 billion transactions annually, and owns and operates the ATH® network, one of the leading personal identification number (“PIN”) debit networks in Latin America.
 
“The construction of Continum Datacenter at Invenio University gives life to the first technological free zone to develop within a university campus in the history of Costa Rica,” stated Adrián Lachner, Invenio’s board president, at the groundbreaking for the new building.

A growing trend among multinational corporations is to ally with higher education. In May 2014, IBM announced their partnership with 28 new business schools and universities “to help prepare students for the 4.4 million jobs that will be created worldwide to support big data by 2015.”