R O S ST N VE UR IN E T R
ERA OF THE SUPER DATA BLOCKCHAIN NATION THE CENTRE AND ITS ECONOMIES
VOL 5 ISSUE 2 | FEB/MAR 20
INSIDE PRIVATE EQUITY AND HEDGE FUNDS REVOLUTION GERMANY’S HEARTBEAT MILLENNIALS AND GEN-ZS WILL SAVE THE WORLD MUST-READ BOOKS FOR DATA CENTRE EXECUTIVES
30 UNDER 30 The 30 young people shaking things up in the world of data centres and cloud.
THE 30 UNDER 30 IN DATA CENTRES, CLOUD AND DATA
PRESENTING THE WORLD’S TOP 25
FINANCE & INVESTMENT MOVERS AND SHAKERS
VOL 1 | 7 JUNE 2017
DATA CENTRES THE NEW OIL REFINERIES DON’T EXPECT DEDICATED DATA CENTRES FOR AI SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST: THE STATE OF CLOUD IN FINANCE
VOL 2 | 30 OCTOBER 2017
FUTURE NOW
HUAWEI: A DRAGON’S JOURNEY TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD THE SECRET USED BY AWS TO BUILD NEW CLOUD REGIONS
INSIDE BUILDING THE WORLD’S LARGEST DATA CENTRE 5 WAYS AI AND IOT WILL CHANGE THE DATA CENTRE AND THE EDGE AS YOU KNOW IT
EMEA’S 50 MOST INFLUENTIAL
Here’s the GDPR guru
SHEILA FITZPATRICK
THE TOP HOT INDUSTRIES DRIVING THE NORDIC DATA CENTRE GROWTH
Preparing for history’s biggest data privacy revolution
IN DATA CENTRES, CLOUD AND DATA
GDPR MASTERED TRANSPARENCY. COMPLIANCE. FOUNDATION. Data Economy magazine.indd 1
24/10/2019 12:03:48
VOL 1: JUNE 2017
200,000 SQF DATA CENTRES IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND
‘THERE’S A BROAD RANGE OF CEOS WHO PERHAPS BEHAVE LESS APPROPRIATELY THAN THEY SHOULD.’
SERVERLESS COMPUTING THE SILENT REVOLUTION IN YOUR FACILITY
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW NETAPP’S CEO GEORGE KURIAN
EDGE COMPUTING SEXIEST SIDE
EXPOSED
INSIDE TEST YOUR INVESTOR INSTINCTS
NORDIC SPECIAL INSIDE
VOL 3 | 31 JANUARY 2018
COLOCATION EMPIRE SPEED. SIMPLICITY. ADAPTABILITY.
INSIDE DIGITAL ACCELERATING GROWTH & DEMAND Digital Realty CEO Bill Stein opens up on the three critical data
A look at how the world’s largest data centre company operates with Steve Smith, CEO and President, Equinix Data Economy magazine Edition 2.indd 1
ALL THE TOP DATA CENTRE M&AS OF THE LAST 6 YEARS
centre acquisitions that catapulted the company from $0 to $24bn
24/10/2019 11:47:38
VOL 2: OCTOBER 2017
Data Economy magazine Edition 3.indd 1
24/10/2019 11:48:51
VOL 3: JANUARY 2018
AFRICA DATA CENTER ASSOCIATION. Envisioning Africa’s Digital Destiny
VOL 7 | 28 SEPTEMBER 2018
INSIDE DATACLOUD AFRICA 2018 EVENT GUIDE WITH SPEAKERS, SESSIONS AND SPONSORS
UNLOCKING
AFRICA
SUBSEA. LAND. EVERYWHERE. With an infrastructure CAPEX of over $1bn, Angola Cables is one of the biggest spenders in the African telecoms and data centre space. António Nunes, CEO, opens up about the immense opportunity the continent boosts to the industry and the company.
Data Economy Edition 7 Africa.indd 1
24/10/2019 11:56:14
VOL 7: SEPTEMBER 2018
#POWER200 THE WORLD’S MOST INFLUENCIAL LEADERS
#POWERWOMEN50
THE WORLD’S MOST INFLUENCIAL WOMEN
数据经济
F O Y R IT A RS YE IVE D
How Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple change the hosting game forever
ER D ITY EN L G UA EQ
NORDIC POWERHOUSE.
VOL 9 | NOVEMBER 2018 APRIL/MAY 2019
VOL 10 | JANUARY 2019
INSIDE CONTINUING WAVES OF DATA CENTRE INVESTMENT TO GENERATE $6BN IN REVENUES
INSIDE ASIA 2020: THE DECADE OF THE TRILLIONS CHINA’S FLYING UNICORNS DATA CENTRE M&A HITS $81BN MEET CLOUD’S VERY OWN INDIANA JONES
INSIDE GLOBAL VILLAGE A VISION OF US IN 2025 HOW SKYDIVING TRIGGERED EDGE COMPUTING
INTERNET
DIGITAL
FRONTRUNNER TECHPLOMACY. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. DATA CENTRES. Data Economy speaks exclusively with Denmark’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Anders Samuelsen on the country’s hyperscaler data centre boom, the need for tech-ambassadors and AI as a tool in foreign policy.
Data Economy Edition 9.indd 1
VOL 9: NOVEMBER 2018
BOSS
AT THE EDGE OF
SPACE
SILENT BECOMES HEARD
Data Economy speaks exclusively to the European Space Agency’s Director General Johann-Dietrich Wörner on borderless cooperation, computing in space and the challenges on Earth from plastic in the Oceans to Brexit and Donald Trump.
24/10/2019 11:57:57
Data Economy Edition 10.indd 1
VOL 10: JANUARY 2019
24/10/2019 11:58:47
Serial internet entrepreneur Jay Adelson: “Planet Earth is now a data centre”. From founding Equinix to becoming one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the World, this is the real story behind Silicon Valley’s data visionaire.
Data Economy Edition 11.indd 1
VOL 11: APRIL / MAY 2019
24/10/2019 11:59:56
NTRES FOR AI
HUAWEI: A DRAGON’S JOURNEY TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD
BUILDING THE WORLD’S LARGEST DATA CENTRE
RANGE OF CEOS WHO PERHAPS BEHAVE LESS APPROPRIATELY THAN THEY SHOULD.’
OF YOUR HAND
SERVERLESS COMPUTING THE SILENT REVOLUTION IN YOUR FACILITY
EXPOSED
EDGE COMPUTING SEXIEST SIDE
TAKING THE TEMPERATURE OF CHINA’S BOOMING DATA CENTRE MARKET
VOL 8: OCTOBER 2018
EN
NOV 19
S BE U O L N EXC
#CLIMATE50 THE TOP MOST INFLUENTIAL CLIMATE LEADERS
HOW CRYPTOCURRENCY WILL CHALLENGE AND CHANGE DATA CENTRES
24/10/2019 11:50:36
ESTATE TO HYPERSCALING
NO
INSIDE GREENPEACE’S LATEST ON DATA CENTRES EXTINCTION REBELLION VS THE INTERNET BRAZIL’S MORE THAN SAMBA, IT’S DATA WHO SHOULD PAY FOR THE EDGE?
QUIZ: HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW APAC?
INSIDE GREENPEACE’S LATEST ON DATA CENTRES SEP/OCT 2019 EXTINCTION REBELLION VS THE INTERNET BRAZIL’S MORE THAN SAMBA, IT’S DATA WHO SHOULD PAY FOR THE EDGE?
INSIDE INFILTRATING DATA CENTRES AND 5G LEARNINGS FROM AFRICA'S ECONOMIC HISTORY AFRICA'S TMT BILLIONAIRES 100 BLACK GIRLS IN TECH
E IZ PR E L SIV BE U O L N EXC
YP SEC
SEP/OCT 2019
ON AN EXCLUSIVE DATA EXPEDITION TO ANTARCTICA
DIGITAL DRAGONS
ECONOMY BUILDER
TECH DRIVEN REVOLUTION
D On a tour with Global Cloud Xchange CEO Bill Barney through ID H S S ET APAC’s multi-trillion business landscape R T’ Dollar
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL LEADERS ON THE CONTINENT
Data Economy Edition 5.indd 1
VOL 5: JUNE 2018
Schneider Electric's CEO Jean-Pascal Tricoire: “All data centres should be far more efficient”. From fighting Global Warming to the development of smart cities and the future of data centres, this is the exclusive one-on-one interview the sector has been waiting for.
The vision of a Pan-African data centre brand has never been so close. 24/10/2019 12:01:43
SINCE 2010 WORTH $66.5BN
DATA
DIPLOM
TECHNOLOGY, CULTU
Data Economy speaks exclusively to Minister Xavier Bettel on the govt’s Facebook’s privacy scandal to data cen
CLIMATE GUARDIAN CLIMATE CHANGER GUARDIAN
The vision of a Pan-African data centre brand has never been so close. A true CEO for all of Africa, Stephane Duproz talks heavy investment trends all across a continent that is set to welcome billions of Dollars from overseas.
"The tech world resembles the pioneers who went the 13.indd past." 24/10/2019 12:00:49 westward in Data Economy 1
Data Economy Edition 8.indd 1
Cyxtera’s CEO Manuel D. Medina talks on the 24/10/2019 exclusively 11:57:09 burgeoning hosting industry, how edge is changing everything, investment trends, and why Trump, North Korea, Iran and others can’t stop the tech revolution.
#CLIMATE50 THE TOP MOST INFLUENTIAL CLIMATE LEADERS
EG
PIONEERS
"The tech world resembles the pioneers who went westward in the past." From India to the Valley, natural born leader George Kurian is one of the world's most successful CEOs for his vision and leadership.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW NETAPP’S CEO GEORGE KURIAN
POLITICS. ECONOMY. GLOBALISATION
Data Economy magazine Edition 4.indd 1
VOL 4: MARCH 2018
EN D ID H S S T T’ RE YP SEC
EG
INSIDE INFILTRATING DATA CENTRES AND 5G JUN/JUL 2019 LEARNINGS FROM AFRICA'S ECONOMIC HISTORY AFRICA'S TMT BILLIONAIRES 100 BLACK GIRLS IN TECH
#AFRICA50
THE SECRET USED BY AWS TO BUILD NEW CLOUD REGIONS
Cyxtera’s CEO Manuel D. Medina talks exclusively on the burgeoning hosting industry, how edge is changing everything, investment trends, and why Trump, North Korea, Iran and others can’t stop the tech revolution.
NEW WORLD GAME PIONEERS NEW WORLDCHANGER GAME
#AFRICA50 THE MOST INFLUENTIAL LEADERS
IF IT’S NOT HERE, IT’S NOT WORTH READING AB
ER
W H E N ST D RI ISA KE S S T
JUN/JUL 2019
INSIDE WITNESSES TO SILENT REVOLUTIONS DATA CENTRE BILLIONAIRES CLUB TOUCHING THE SKY, BANKING ON CLOUD QUIZ: THE DECADE’S TOP TRANSACTIONS
ER ST A IS S D IKE EN TR S
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INSIDE NEW EQUINIX CEO’S FIRST BIG INTERVIEW DATA CENTRE M&AS TRACKER TOPS $70BN
VOL 8: OCTOBER 2018
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INSIDE WITNESSES TO SILENT REVOLUTIONS DATA CENTRE BILLIONAIRES CLUB TOUCHING THE SKY, BANKING ON CLOUD QUIZ: THE DECADE’S TOP TRANSACTIONS
INSIDE DIGITAL
24/10/2019 11:50:36
LAW. POWER. FUTURE.
Interxion Ireland’s boss Tanya Duncan talks challenges and opportunities, the post-Brexit Irish24/10/2019 data11:55:31 centre market and what 2019 has up its sleeves for the company and the sector.
VOL 6: SEPTEMBER 2018
DOORSTEP FOR FREE!
2019
MARCHING ON
ACCELERATING GROWTH & DEMAND
Data Economy magazine Edition 4.indd 1
LAW. POWER. FUTURE.
Interxion Ireland’s boss Tanya Duncan talks challenges and opportunities, the post-Brexit Irish data centre market and what 2019 has up its sleeves for the company and the sector.
Digital Realty CEO Bill Stein opens up on the three critical data centre acquisitions that catapulted the company from $0 to $24bn
VOL 5: JUNE 2018
On a tour with Global Cloud Xchange CEO Bill Barney through APAC’s multi-trillion Dollar business landscape
VOL 6 | 13 SEPTEMBER
MARCHING ON
Data Economy speaks exclusively to Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel on the govt’s role in technology, from 24/10/2019 11:51:32 Data Economy Edition 6 Dublin.indd 1 Facebook’s privacy scandal to data centres and Data Embassies.
Data Economy Edition 5.indd 1
VOL 4: MARCH 2018
Data Economy magazine Edition 3.indd 1
VOL 4: MARCH 2018
VOL 3: JANUARY 2018
#POWERWOMEN50
24/10/2019 11:50:36
VOL 6 | 13 SEPTEMBER 2018
INSIDE DATACLOUD IRELAND 2018 EVENT GUIDE WITH SPEAKERS, SESSIONS AND SPONSORS
TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE & PEOPLE
TECH DRIVEN REVOLUTION
Data Economy magazine Edition 4.indd 1
e GDPR guru
Data Economy speaks exclusively to Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel on the govt’s role in technology, from Facebook’s privacy scandal to data centres and Data Embassies.
ECONOMY BUILDER
THE TOP HOT INDUSTRIES DRIVING THE NORDIC DATA CENTRE GROWTH
TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE & PEOPLE
DIPLOMAT DATA DIPLOMAT
On a tour with Global Cloud Xchange CEO Bill Barney through APAC’s multi-trillion Dollar business landscape
PATRICK
DATA
TAKING THE TEMPERATURE OF CHINA’S BOOMING DATA CENTRE MARKET
TECH DRIVEN REVOLUTION 数据经济
24/10/2019 11:48:51
DIGITAL DRAGONS
ECONOMY BUILDER
AL
ND
QUIZ: HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW APAC?
24/10/2019 11:47:38
EQ GEN U D A ER LI TY
E TOP ENTRE OF THE YEARS
HOW CRYPTOCURRENCY WILL CHALLENGE AND CHANGE DATA CENTRES
ON AN EXCLUSIVE DATA EXPEDITION TO ANTARCTICA
DIGITAL DRAGONS TAKING THE TEMPERATURE OF CHINA’S BOOMING DATA CENTRE MARKET
TOP INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES FROM REAL ESTATE TO HYPERSCALING
ory’s biggest cy revolution
QUIZ: HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW APAC?
COLOCATION EMPIRE
ON AN EXCLUSIVE DATA EXPEDITION TO ANTARCTICA
in data centre investment makes Irela DATA TIGER $11bn beacon of success for the industry internatio
INSIDE DATACLOUD IRELAND 2018 EVENT VOL 5 | JUNE 2018 GUIDE WITH SPEAKERS, SESSIONS AND SPONSORS
INSIDE ALL THE DATA CENTRE M&AS SINCE 2010 WORTH $66.5BN
APAC NAKED
SPEED. SIMPLICITY. ADAPTABILITY.
HOW CRYPTOCURRENCY WILL CHALLENGE AND CHANGE DATA CENTRES
ED ATION.
UTING T SIDE
OSED
数据经济
EDGE COMPUTING’S MOST INFLUENCIAL LEADERS VOL 5 | JUNE 2018 A look at how the world’s largest data centre company operates with Steve Smith, CEO and President, Equinix
UTING UTION CILITY
TOP INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES FROM REAL ESTATE TO HYPERSCALING
Data Economy magazine Edition 2.indd 1
DATA PALM HAND
INSIDE ALL THE DATA CENTRE M&AS 2010 VOL 4 | 22SINCE MARCH 2018 WORTH $66.5BN
VOL 2: OCTOBER 2017
E NOW
#EDGE50
VOL 4 | 22 MARCH 2018
APAC NAKED
in data centre investment makes Ireland a DATA TIGER $11bn beacon of success for the industry internationally
EDGE COMPUTING’S MOST INFLUENCIAL LEADERS
APAC’S 50 MOST INFLUENCIAL LEADERS
数据经济
ARY 2018
#EDGE50
24/10/2019 12:03:48
#POWER200 THE WORLD’S MOST INFLUENCIAL LEADERS
RS
Digital Destiny
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s one of re space. unity the
24/10/2019 11:56:14
acebook, and game forever
OVEMBER 2018
APAC’S 50 MOST INFLUENCIAL LEADERS
Schneider Electric's CEO Jean-Pascal Tricoire: “All data centres should be far more efficient
From India to the Valley, natural born leader George Kurian is one of the true CEO for all of Africa, Stephane Duproz talks heavy investment trends all From fighting Global Warming to the development of smart cities and the future of data VOL 12: JUNE/JULY 2019 VOL 13: SEPTEMBER /AOCTOBER 2019 VOL 14: NOVEMBER 2019 world's most successful CEOs for his vision and leadership. across a continent that is set to welcome billions of Dollars from overseas. centres, this is the exclusive one-on-one interview the sector has been waiting for.
Data Economy 12.indd 1
24/10/2019 12:00:49
Data Economy 13.indd 1
24/10/2019 12:01:43
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CONTENTS 7
Editorial: New Owners João Marques Lima, Editor-In-Chief of Data Economy and Capacity Media
GLOBAL LEADERSHIP TALKS 8
08
Private equity and cloud real estate Christian Sinding, CEO & Managing Partner, EQT Marc Ganzi, Co-Founder and CEO, Digital Colony
12 Where banking meets technology Claire Thompson, Head of Data & Analytics for Commercial and Private Banking, RBS
LOCATION FOCUS 15 Germany: Europe’s heartbeat The world’s fourth largest economy has over the centuries shaped history at home and abroad
TECHNOLOGY DISRUPTIONS
12
18 Blockchain Nation The biggest revolution with the potential to impact every industry
FINVEST: FINANCE AND INVESTMENT WATCH 30 Investor returns Frederic Moeller, CFO, SafeHost 32 Opinion: Is trade M&A getting more interesting? Steve Wallage, MD, BroadGroup Consulting
CAREERS INSIDER 28 Millennials and Gen-Zs will save the world Bill Kleyman, co-chair of the Millennials/Gen-Z Member Resource Group, Infrastructure Masons
15
34 Startup Watch: Redefining edge computing Bill Miller, CEO, Axellio 36 New Gen: Breaking into the data centre sector Christopher Stumm, Business Development Manager, Global Data Centers, NTT Ltd. 37 Executive Moves The most recent movers and shakers 38 Must Read: Tech book watch list What’s better than one book? SIX!
30
#30under30
The 30 under 30 industry talents changing data centres and cloud around the world 21
36
EDITORIAL
Editorial Editor-in-Chief João Marques Lima Deputy Editor Melanie Mingas Editor-at-Large Alan Burkitt-Gray Senior Reporter Abigail Opiah Senior Reporter Natalie Bannerman Freelance Reporter Antony Savvas Publishing & Marketing Head of Marketing John Vather Digital Marketing Executive Denisa Gavril Advertising Media Solutions Manager Jason McGee-Abe Regional Business Development Manager Adam Dar GM APAC Marcello Brescia International Sales Manager Charles Newman International Sales Manager Federico Mancini Events Events Services Director Francine Low Head of Content Ivan Suarez Content Manager Nyree Scales Head of Awards & Special Projects Thabian Sutherland Operations Manager Helena Silver Accounts Customer Service Executive James Fidling Production Production & Marketing Coordinator Pablo Gainza IT Manager Norbert Rakossy Head Designer Andrew Convery Print Designer Maxine Morgan Corporate Divisional Director, Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC Rosalind Irving Chairman, BroadGroup Philip Low MD, BroadGroup Gregory Gerot Directors Leslie Van De Walle (Chairman), Andrew Rashbass (CEO), Tristan Hillgarth, Imogen Joss, Jan Babiak, Lorna Tilbian, Colin Day, Wendy Pallot, Tristan Hillgarth, Tim Pennington World Headquarters Data Economy Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC 8 Bouverie Street, London EC4Y 8AX United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7779 8888 Regional Offices Data Economy, BroadGroup Euromoney Institutional Investor 38/F, Hopewell Centre, 183 Queen’s Road East, Wanchai, Hong Kong Tel: +852 2523 3399 General Enquiries Tel: +44 (02)207 779 7348 enquiries@data-economy.com advertising@data-ecnomy.com Next Issue 01 April 2020
The Data Economy Magazine is published bi-monthly by Data Economy, part of Broadmedia Communications t/a BroadGroup, a division of Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC division. ©BroadGroup, 2020. All rights reserved. ISSN 2632-4601. Data Economy is a member of the Public Publishers Association (which has represented media companies and its professionals for over 100 years). No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into any retrieval system, or introduced into any form or by any means, electronic, manual, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. The Data Economy Magazine is also a free publication, therefore selling copies is strictly forbidden and can lead to legal action. Although BroadGroup has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this publication, neither it nor any contributor can accept any legal responsibility whatsoever for consequences that may arise from errors or omissions or any opinions or advice given. All information provided in this edition is correct at the time of going to press.
João Marques Lima, Editor-In-Chief of Data Economy and Capacity Media
NEW OWNERS The data centre world is as much about colocation as it is about real estate. The giant shells that host millions of servers have now become an attractive asset to private equity (PE) firms who in 2019 spent Billions of dollars. In fact, the number of deals in 2019 was 50% higher than in the previous year, with 80% of the 100 transactions being originated by PE investors. These are the new owners of the data centre. If we look at the period between 2015 and today, of the 350 deals, PE has accounted for 57% of these. The typical investor of the data centre has gone from being someone who has been involved in the sector for a good part of his/her career, to new names that have been following and educating themselves on the industry in recent years – which has also created a demand for data centre experts working for PE rather than hosting companies. Digital Colony, EQT, Macquarie Group, Brookfield, Bain Capital, Temasek Holdings, Stonepeak and BC Partners are just some of the new-ish names on the block in recent years and who in 2019, pushed forward with their investments. Now that we are in 2020, it is expected that such names and new ones will continue to purchase their share of the data centre pie. However, it is almost no secret that there is currently more money available to buy than there are brands to invest in – or at least to use all of the available billions of Dollars for investment. It will be interesting to see how the market will shift in 2020 – and into 2021 for instance-, if new large data centre brands will be launched, how the big gunners of colocation will target markets across Africa and other emerging colocation regions – if organically or inorganically -, or if PE folks will resume to mostly investing in just building out their portfolios. Truth be told, data centres are not the largest investment risk out there, and with the demand for digital services booming across the planet – look at how the edge has now become its own investment avenue-, these buildings are today almost a bullet-proof investment to economic turmoil or world instability – provided the facility is located in a safe area. As we see in Zurich, during Data Economy’s Finvest Summit 2020, the data centre is a lively and huge opportunity to the finance and investment community around the globe. That is what we bring you in this edition of the magazine, where we also found it would be a good place to unveil some of tomorrow’s leaders with the new edition of the Data Economy 30 Under 30. I look forward to catching up with most of you throughout 2020, but in the meantime, enjoy this magazine. Yours sincerely,
www.data-economy.com
7
PRIVATE EQUITY AND CLOUD REAL ESTATE You can’t get far in the tech industry without hitting a private-equity investor. In the data centre sector, these investors are in the middle of the industry’s boom as Alan Burkitt-Gray finds out.
Data Economy | Invest Wisely
GLOBAL LEADERSHIP TALKS
From Blackstone to Carlyle and Silver Lake to TPG, the industry abounds in organisations that raise billions from investors and invest the money in a range of technology companies. A couple of the most prominent names in the industry at the moment are Digital Colony, based in the US, and EQT, based in Sweden. The two are mainly independent, but they have a joint venture to buy fibre operator Zayo for $14.3 billion, a deal that’s expected to go through by the middle of 2020. Companies that are owned by privateequity (PE) investors are not like those that raise money by selling their shares in stock exchanges. For a start, public companies – those on stock exchanges from New York to London to Hong Kong – list their shareholders on publicly available registers. You’ll never find a list of investors whose money is looked after by Carlyle or its peers. But there is a second big difference. Listed companies make regular announcements – often every three months – of their trading figures. If they’re backed by private equity, there’s no need to do so: it’s all private. PE-backed companies tend to value that freedom. Boards and CEOs can have a bad quarter, or even a bad year, and the only people they have to tell are their PE owner – and they know anyway, because they’re almost always on the board, checking and approving every move.
There’s no share price to plummet, and no danger of a rival moving in with a bid. Though, of course, a PE owner has the same information, and might decide at any time to sell up, or fire the CEO. And sometimes the PE company itself has its shares quoted on a stock exchange – one step removed from investment target itself, but a crucial step. Norway-born Christian Sinding has been with EQT since 1998, when he was only 22 and he joined as partner and head of equity. Today he serves as the business’ CEO and managing partner. His first encounter with EQT was when Sinding was working in New York for a company that had a small stake in the PE operation. “I saw just a totally different culture and a potential for me to grow, so I moved to Scandinavia and I’ve been there ever since,” he says on a video profile. Two decades later, in January 2019, he got the top role at the company. EQT is “one of the few” in the industry “that are driven by our values”, he says. “At EQT you can be yourself. All the doors are open.” Except to business journalists, apparently. “All of us want to make sure we get the best answer to any question at any point in time. It’s fun. It’s inspirational.” Marc Ganzi, who runs Digital Colony, is much more open. He speaks at industry conferences and speaks to the press
occasionally. Ganzi had come into the infrastructure investment business almost by accident, thanks to a couple of people who’d been with him at the Wharton School of Business in the early 1990s. “My ambition was to be in finance and real estate,” he explained, adding that his first job after college was at a realestate investment trust, “doing M&A work and buying distressed real estate”. But some of the buildings had “a couple of these things called ‘antenna leases’ with cellular telephone companies”, he recalls. “Because I was the young kid from Wharton, everyone thought that I understood technology and that I was smart.” He discovered these leases were an investor’s dream – 30-year leases on “space that was deemed a liability, the roof, collecting rain”, he said. “When people started paying us thousands of dollars for rooftop space, a light went off in my head.” His former Wharton colleagues, Alex Gellman and Jeff Ginsberg, had already started a cellular phone company. “Cell phones were coming. There was just going to be this massive surge in real estate,” said Ganzi. “The three of us got together – I understood real estate, they understood cellular communications, and we put these skills together. It was completely accidental, like all great things in life.”
www.data-economy.com
19
GLOBAL LEADERSHIP TALKS
The group has expanded from aerials on rooftops to fibre routes and data centres. At the heart of all of those is real estate. “At the end of the day, digital infrastructure is probably more parts real estate than technology. When you think about data centres and towers and fibre networks, they require entitlements [permissions and approvals] and a real property interest, whether that’s owning the land, whether that’s an easement, or a long-term lease,” he told me. Christian Sinding, EQT, CEO
Marc Ganzi, Co-founder and CEO Digital Bridge
These concepts mirror those that investors in real estate will understand. “Remember, when you place infrastructure, it’s on land. Fibre’s underground, you need an easement; a data centre is sitting on land, you need to own the acreage, or you need a long-term lease; a cell phone tower sits on a parcel of real estate and you own that land or you have a lease.” The business cases for digital infrastructure “are completely ingrained in real-estate principles”. But digital infrastructure makes more money than just real estate, according to a revealing statistic from Sinding, in EQT’s third-quarter results in January. It is making an EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) margin of 55-65% on current investments. EQT invested €11.9 billion in 2019 and raised €8 billion by exiting previous investments. Last year’s figures showed a considerable rise on 2018, when EQT invested €8.6 billion and raised €5.1 billion in exits. It has already allocated around €14 billion from the €20 billion investment funds it set up in 2018 – and in January it announced it was raising another €14 billion in a new fund.
“We’re ultimately performance driven,” he said in that corporate video. “You’re part of something bigger than yourself.” EQT is still announcing new investments at a remarkable rate. In early February it added RIMES, a manged data services company, to its portfolio. RIMES says it “pioneered the delivery of customised market and reference data via the cloud and has built a strong reputation for ensuring best-in-class data quality”. It adds: “Today, RIMES serves more than 350 asset managers, owners, servicers and banks in 45 financial centres globally, including 60 of the top 100 global investment managers and nine of the top ten asset servicers in the world.” A week later came another joint venture, with OMERS Infrastructure, to buy Deutsche Glasfaser, a German fibre-tothe-premises company. Meanwhile Ganzi’s PE business has united three UK companies that it has bought since August 2018 under a new, single brand, Freshwave. These are three formerly separate businesses that specialise in providing indoor and outdoor mobile networks on behalf of licensed operators: in Twickenham stadium in west London, for example. “We also work with real-estate owners that want coverage in their buildings,” Simon Frumkin, CEO of Freshwave since the beginning of January, told me at Digital Colony’s London offices. You may think you’re working in the high technology world of data centres and digital infrastructure; but to many investors, it’s just another form of real estate.
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WHERE BANKING MEETS TECHNOLOGY The financial services sector, an industry that contributed £132bn to the UK economy in 2018, has drastically changed its digitalisation process over the past few years as a matter of urgency, but also as a direct response to the changing habits of consumers and new competitive environments. Amongst the frontrunners of change in the banking industry is RBS. Claire Thompson, Head of Data & Analytics for Commercial and Private Banking at RBS, who was recognised this year by DataIQ as one of the 100 most influential people in data and analytics in the UK, sits down with Abigail Opiah to break down the collaborative affect the tech industry has on the financial sector. In her role, Thompson is accountable for the vision and strategy of data and analytics and the leadership and development of around 230 people both off and onshore. Her remit covers all customers in the Commercial and Private bank across all channels with teams focused on key areas such as data science, data engineering, digital, decisioning, software engineering, data governance and performance insights. “Given the size and remit of the team, no two days are ever the same; this variety is just one of the reasons why I love the job so much. My day can involve anything from advising senior stakeholders about innovative ways data can be used to solve complex problems, helping individuals achieve their career aspirations, setting the vision and strategy for the team and many things in between,” she says. Thompson started her career as an SAS analyst and quickly navigated herself to working for some of the biggest names in the sector including the likes of Barclays. Thompson reveals that one of the key skills she brought along with her throughout her career journey is problemsolving.
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“One of my major strengths is the ability to ask questions and use data to understand why something is happening.” adds Thompson. “It means I’m good at quickly spotting patterns and connections, sorting through the clutter to find the best solution; helping make informed and balanced decisions. It’s this analytical skillset that has helped me in all of my roles since my early days as a SAS analyst, even though I no longer code.” As more consumers have adapted to digital interaction in several areas of their lives, there has also been a calling for financial services to follow suit. And the changes haven’t gone unnoticed. When discussing some of the key trends, Thompson has witnessed regarding the digitalisation of the industry, she explains that it all boils down to increasing expectations of real-time and effortless banking from a customer lens. “In a few years, I would expect to see most interactions between customers and banks to be hyper-personalised. I would also expect real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI) to become widely utilised in some form. Intelligent automation will emerge as a big trend and become a cost differentiator between firms – reducing basic tasks and data processing, where Machine Learning can be used to do a better, quicker and more reliable job. That said, human oversight will remain critical,” she explains.
“In terms of the technical side of this, we are seeing increasing use of Natural Language Processing not only for chatbots, but also to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ intentions and needs across a range of digital channels. This, combined with traditional structured data, has huge potential power.” Speaking of AI, this is certainly providing a significant basis for future technological innovation, but there is lots of groundwork that still needs to be done. One main thing that Thompson points out is that it’s imperative to change society’s perception about the realistic abilities of AI as it exists today. “Whilst there are risks associated with using big data and AI, the main misconception is that AI is too clever and is going to take over the world. As humans, we tend to anthropomorphise – attribute human traits, emotions and intentions to non-human things. For example, dogs or robots,” she explains. “AI can do some very specific things amazingly well, like detect cancer from body scans. However, we’re probably decades away from sentient beings. I would expect that there will be an everincreasing variety and velocity of data processing. It also gets more complex as companies engage in more partnershipdriven approaches, requiring complex data and process integration. “Technologies such as APIs help massively in this regard, providing standardised
GLOBAL LEADERSHIP TALKS
The Twenty awardees at Women in Data conference – November 2019
connectivity. There is also an increasing focus on ethical use of bigger data in Financial Services, as well as specifically on managing the risks and potential public harm from the potential irresponsible use of AI – beyond current legislation. This is an emerging field and we are actively engaging with UK bodies on this agenda.” When asked about the one thing Thompson is looking forward to in the new decade, she reveals that she is looking forward to seeing what more can be achieved with the continued growth on data as well as the continuous evolution in both tools and techniques. “This will mean companies can dramatically change the way they work and ultimately it will be customers who will benefit from this changing landscape. I’m most excited about the continual advances being made with AI, particularly in supporting healthcare,” she said.
Currently, for every four men that enter the data industry, there is just one woman. I believe movements like this are vital for making positive role models more visible.
“For example, in helping patients recover the ability to walk. It’s amazing to see this become a reality, as through undoubted evolution, it will significantly change the lives of millions of people.”
MYTHS REGARDING DATA SCIENTISTS Thompson’s remit covers all customers in the Commercial and Private bank across all channels with teams focused on key areas such as data science as well as data engineering. In the nascent field of Data Science, myths are abound. When asked to list a few prominent ones, she says: “One of the myths is that if you recruit a data scientist, you’ll be able to do to AI. The reality is that it takes far more than just data science to make AI a reality. Depending on what you’re looking to do you will need a variety of different skills as the hard part is actually getting the model into production.
“The other is that you have to be an ‘egghead’ to become a data scientist! You don’t have to be a great statistician, or mathematician to become a Data Scientist; however, it does help. Data Science for me is all about teamwork and embracing a diversity of skills. As well as working with data, you’ve got to be able to communicate - share the results of your amazing analysis with colleagues in an understandable way. “Many Data Scientists are crossdisciplinarians, with some knowledge of stats and coding, plus a dash of business acumen/ethics/interpersonal skills thrown in. It’s very rare to find an individual that has all the skills necessary to wear all of the Data Science hats at the same time.”
WOMEN IN DATA Last year, Thompson was amongst ambassadors of the ‘Twenty in Data and Technology’ collection for 2019 in collaboration with NBrown. “Currently, for every four men that enter the data industry, there is just one woman. I believe movements like this are vital for making positive role models more visible. This can only help in inspiring more females and future generations into the industry,” she adds. “Using our own personal career paths stories helps others on their own journey and can change the face of data and technology in the future. When I first started out in my career, there weren’t very many women at a senior level, so it’s great that things are changing. For me personally, I feel incredibly proud to be working for the first bank, out of the big four in the UK, with a female CEO and a female CFO.” Women in Data UK works to connect women across the profession, providing mentoring and showcasing for real-world female role models.
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EDGE EUROPE MAINZ 25-26 MARCH 2020 TOWARDS EDGE AS A SERVICE
EDGE EUROPE 2020 We believe in a truly connected world. This can only be facilitated by an all-encompassing Edge ecosystem. Edge will be the most transformative opportunity for the next decade. The trend for a more distributed IT architecture will multiply and expand with the convergence of new technologies and developments such as IoT, 5G, AI, autonomous cars and smart cities, connected things, micro-datacenters and Edge facilities. This will enable new ways of analysing and managing the data needed to connect society and drive change.
VENUE Situated on the banks of the River Rhine, Hilton Mainz provides city convenience with peaceful river views. Magnificent architecture, a vibrant cultural scene and Old Town are all nearby. Unwind on the outdoor terrace watching the bustling river or take a relaxing cruise for unique city views. Take in the historical sites and yet still enjoy modern hotel amenities including WiFi and HDTVs.
With strong market drivers, the shift to Edge represents the most profound change that will impact possibly for decades to come. Early deployment particularly evident in North America is expected to achieve significant growth over the next 5 years globally with industry predictions of connections to 25 billion devices, and 50 billion installed or embedded sensors.
Frankfurt Airport (28km) Frankfurt Hahn Airport (87km)
@TheEdgeCongress www.edgecongress.com/europe
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EUROPE’S HEARTBEAT The world’s fourth largest economy, Germany, has over the centuries shaped history at home and abroad. As the new digital age takes over, Germany has built one of the most robust markets for investment. But how much is in it for data centres? João Marques Lima finds out.
The reunification of Germany has been one of the greatest accomplishments of democracy in modern times, a contrast to some of the events we have experienced in the past years and months. When the Brandenburg Gate officially opened on December 22, 1989, it marked not only the fall of Communism in Europe, but also the beginning of a new era for Germany. One of unity and more equality for both citizens and their economy. It wouldn’t, however, be until November 1991 that the full extend of the wall would be completely torn down – with exception to a few historical points along its route still standing today.
Germany is likely to see the biggest investment growth in data centres in the next two years.
Within those two years of ‘transition’, Germany’s economy improved as people and goods could freely cross in and out of West Berlin and East Berlin, and beyond that, West and East Germany were no longer kept apart (the Reunification was officialised on October 3, 1990). Its influence became more prevalent and could be felt throughout Europe and the world. Having been a founding member of the European Union in 1957 – known as the European Economic Community then -, Germany was, for nearly 40 years, also at the centre of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union as Western Germany
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Data centre investment in Germany is forcecasted to top $13.3bn in 2020.
joined the NATO forces and Eastern Germany, the Soviet Union. With Germany reunified in 1990, the Cold War over in 1991, and the wall down by the end of that year, the path was cleared for Germany to rebuild and settle its status as an economic powerhouse, which today, with a population of almost 83 million people, is the world’s 4th largest at nearly $4tr, according to the International Monetary Fund. Of that, around 8% is generated by the nation’s digital economy. Despite being almost 100 years late to the 4th Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the end of the 20th century transformed Germany forever, and the country is today one of the most advanced technologically at the consumer, enterprise and manufacturing levels.
DIGITAL ECONOMY A boom in digital services and adoption in the 2000s has led Germany to one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world at 86.8% in 2019, according to Internet World Stats. The Federal Government has since the beginning of the century made it clear that cloud would be an important part of Germany’s economy, especially within the manufacturing industries. Germany was in 2019 the fourth highest spender on cloud computing technologies, with $9.5bn invested, according to IDC. In first is the US at $124.6bn, followed by China ($10.5bn) and the UK ($10bn).
DLA Piper
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According to BSA’s latest Global Cloud Computing Scorecard published in 2018, Germany ranks first in the world in terms of preparedness to support growth of cloud computing, followed by Japan in second, the USA in third, the UK in fourth and Australia in fifth with Singapore, Canada and France coming up next. Commissioned by Digital Realty and delivered by 451 Research, the analyst house predicts that over the coming two years, German companies will increase their emphasis on cloud transformation as they seek new services. 28% of German companies already use hybrid cloud, 20% are evaluating it, and 29% plan to introduce hybrid cloud in the coming 1224 months. Furthermore, 36% will adopt private-cloud-based IaaS and 36% public cloud (AWS, Google, Azure and now also on Alibaba’s Germany region). All German households have internet speeds of at least 50Mbps. Elsewhere, the French government for example, expects all households to have at least 30Mbps by 2022, while Spain plans for the same by the end of 2020, while Asian countries such as Singapore, Japan and South Korea offer some of the world’s best internets, according to the Software Alliance. Additionally, Germany is Europe’s largest telecom market and has a mobile phone penetration of 130% with nearly 110 million devices in use. With more consumption, data centres have become over the past decade a pillar
DLA Piper European Data Centre Investment Outlook Report Q4 2019
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to daily life, with Germany being one of the world’s largest colocation markets.
data centre facilities than most other EU countries combined.
$66BN IN DATA CENTRE INVESTMENT
Beyond Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Dusseldorf are four other destinations attracting data centre construction to serve Germany’s largest cities and the regions where they sit.
Being a data centre market in one of the world’s strongest economies brings with it heavy investment. Statista estimates that $52.4bn have been poured into data centre projects in Germany just for the period between 2015 to 2019. The think tank forecasts data centre investment to reach $13.3bn in 2020. Figures that are substantiated by DLA Piper’s European Data Centre Investment Outlook Report, which says that Germany is likely to see the biggest investment growth in the next two years compared to other European countries. In its survey, 92% of debt providers and 72% of equity provides said that will offer the most bankable investment opportunities for data centre projects over 2020 and 2021. Notably, 48% of equity investors also expect the UK to see some of the biggest investment growth. Meanwhile, 48% of debt providers think Ireland will see the greatest growth, despite few describing it as offering the most bankable opportunities. Frankfurt is in fact Europe’s third largest data centre market and is part of the FLAP group of cities that includes Frankfurt as well as London, Amsterdam and Paris. Interestingly, Frankfurt alone has more
According to Cloudscene, Germany is home to 426 data centres, of which Frankfurt accounts to 106, followed by Munich (49), Hamburg (40), Berlin (30), Dusseldorf (25), Stuttgart (24), Nuremberg and others. An additional 76 facilities are deemed as “regional” and spread all over the country. The two largest providers are Equinix and Digital Realty/Interxion, with Colt Technology Services, euNetwork, GTT Communications, CenturyLink, Deutsche Telekom and Cogent Communications also englobing a substantial part of the nation’s data centre portfolio. DE-CIX, Megaport and NL-ix are just two of the 20 network fabric operators in the country.
A QUESTION OF POWER? When it comes to energy, Germany has one of the highest ratios of renewable energy production in Europe and in the world. According to the AG Energiebilanzen e.V. (AGEB), an energy working group established in 1971 in Essen by seven associations from the German energy industry and three institutes
active in the field of energy research, Germany produced in 2019 242.6 TWh of power using renewable sources. A further 363 TWh were generated using other sources including lignite, natural gas, nuclear, hard coal, oil and others. Renewables account for 40.1% of the country’s energy production, with wind onshore producing 16.8% of energy, followed by solar power (7.7%), biomass (7.4%), wind offshore (4.1%), hydro power (3.1%) and others. The renewables share in gross power consumption has tripled from 2007 to 2019. Nevertheless, Germany still lags on the share of electricity from renewable sources in gross electricity consumption, as only around 40% of the country’s energy consumption is deemed renewable energy. Countries such as Norway, Albania, Sweden, Denmark, Latvia, Montenegro, Portugal, Croatia and Romania, are all ahead in terms of renewable energy consumption. For data centres, Germany offers enough electricity production to keep the lights on and take advantage of renewable energy. Cloudscene says that data centre consumers enjoy a range of PUE scores between 1.12 and 1.50. The average PUE for German data centres is 1.34. German colocation facilities provide over 438.51 MW of power and has a range of rack power options from 0.90 kW to 25.00 kW.
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BLOCKCHAIN NATION Bitcoin and cryptocurrency began stamping its hypothetical feet and making noise in mainstream media over the last decade, with individuals taking a keen interest in blockchain and its link to banking and investment. Since then blockchain, the technology that runs Bitcoin, has developed into one of the biggest revolutionary technologies with the potential to impact every industry from data centres to the financial sector. Abigail Opiah reports.
Blockchain first arrived on the scene back in 2008 when a person (or group of people) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto released a whitepaper that explored the concept of a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. With the launch of Bitcoin in January 2009, blockchain had its first real-world application. Blockchain’s multiple strands created conversations that go far beyond its original purpose of a growing list of records that are linked using cryptocurrency. According to Vincent Barro, Vice-President Datacentre & Business Development at Schneider Electric, before peeling away at blockchain’s surface level to unlock its full potential, conversations around tokenization need to be had. “When we talk about crypto, we need to talk about blockchain and tokenization, which are the main two technologies behind cryptocurrency. Crypto is huge in terms of banking, and you can see companies like Swisscom invest a lot in crypto which means that they want to take the lead globally on it,” he says. “To be efficient with your customer, you need to have infrastructure and a presence in the cloud. This is extremely critical for blockchain because you are going to need edge. The blockchain business has been predicted to jump from 2.5bn to 20bn by 2025, thus the data centre needs to adapt to this new business strategy. With that being said, there are some challenges that relate to energy including modularity.
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The blockchain business has been predicted to jump from 2.5bn to 20bn by 2025, thus the data centre needs to adapt to this new business strategy. “I have a lot of demand from customers for modular solutions, which can be containerised solutions or something more local. On the other side, you’ve got this link with the cloud providers and major colocation data centres, which conjures the need for super-efficient solutions that leads to liquid cooling which is a big topic at the moment.” Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of the data. In one breath, the conversation led to all the tree-branches that stem from blockchain which puts conjures up the question of what is next for blockchain, will all the big technology players jump on board, and which regions will see the adoption of blockchain completely flourish first. “What has been happening over the last two years is a lot of acceleration within Microsoft and Google to come to Switzerland. The usual situation in Switzerland was more about mediumsized colocators that do colocation business – but there are a lot of restrictions google cloudin the Swiss market,” says Barro.
“Google and Microsoft decided to enter the Swiss market through colocation, with Google communicating that it will enter the market via Green Datacenter AG. Green Datacenter was a small colocation provider, which became a major player in the last two years thanks to Google. “The reason why these company’s feel it is important to be in Switzerland is because they want to be under the Swiss data protection legislation and banking applications. That is mandatory to attack the wall of finance and insurance. “One point which is important but has not been finalised is that Amazon may move to Switzerland as well in the very near future. In terms of finance, this is important because of low latency. With this new ecosystem of data centres, these companies will have about ten milliseconds of improvement in latency which is huge when we talk about finance, and as the country is not very big, it has two interconnected points within an hour and a half between Zurich and Geneva.” “This is because Switzerland has no specific hindrances that affect cryptocurrencies. Switzerland’s Federal Council, the nation’s collective head of state and government, has announced it will commit to improving the legal framework for blockchain and distributed ledger technology companies.” As the conversation steered towards tech giants, one instant ping in the brain was Facebook’s announcement of its very own cryptocurrency, Libra. The cryptocurrency is a permissioned blockchain digital currency that does not yet exist, with only rudimentary experimental code being released so far, but it has been projected to be launched in 2020.
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protocols matured and expanded in growth.
Marshall Johnson, President, Compute North
Compute North’s President Marshall Johnson predicts that migration from China will continue in regards to blockchain and hash rate will continue to jump. His other predictions for blockchain is that there will be a continued evolution of the technology, and as a result, there will be further enterprise adoption, especially in financial services, supply chain and banking. Lastly, he predicts that low costs will still win, previous generation machines will be dead this year unless there is serious price movement, and halvening will make some miners go out of business that have not upgraded their equipment. In a halvening - also referred to as halving - Bitcoin rewards that go to the so-called miners that support the coin’s network drop in half in order to prevent inflation from eroding the purchasing power of the coins.
Vincent Barro, Vice President Datacentre & Business development, Schneider Electric
“At the moment, there are around 240 cryptocurrencies in the world, thus we see consolidation in this environment, which is set to grow more,” adds Barro. 240 cryptocurrencies are a lot of cryptocurrencies. The blockchain sector has witnessed the birth of new alliances, Bitcoin and Ethereum survived the bear market, new cryptocurrency trading products and a plethora of blockchain
“Since bitcoin has halved twice in the past, we can say that it has shown to be a major catalyst in setting off a new bull market era for bitcoin. As bitcoin halves and fewer are being generated, the increased scarcity leads to an increase in value,” says Johnson. “The increased scarcity of bitcoin means only the most high-performing and highefficiency mining operations will stand to see steady or increased profits following the halving. This makes outdated miners like the Antminer S9 nearly irrelevant without some sort of optimisation strategy to extend their productive life. “This will drive many to upgrade to a more efficient miner like the Antminer
S17, especially for large-scale operations. Utilisation of cheap energy and mining colocation should also be leaned on more significantly leading up to and in the wake of the halving in order to maximise profit in an increasingly competitive market.” Like Barro, Johnson too identifies the link with blockchain and data centres, highlighting that there will continue to be high demand low-cost computing and storage, which will put pressure on the data centre sector to evolve and adapt. “Worldwide data and computing requirements continue to grow rapidly. Blockchain and many applications are not mission-critical, require vast amounts of power and resources, and there is a trend to outsourcing these types of applications (IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Image Rendering, and Blockchain),” says Johnson. “This opens the door for innovative solutions, like the Tier 0 data centre infrastructure that Compute North is developing and building. North America offers a unique blend of power resources, geopolitical stability, and reliable infrastructure that is appealing to mining operations. “Although China recently reversed a two-year ban on cryptocurrencies, volatility and uncertain still exists in the region as government oversight of the sector appears to be in a regular state of flux. By moving some of their mining operations to the U.S., miners benefit from a more stable economic environment, the availability and mix of cleaner energy, stronger infrastructure and the advantages of an industry that is held to a higher standard. Diversifying operations is recommended to mitigate risk.”
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oung f the 30 y o t s li a , 0 ive 0 Under 3 s in a new innovat 3 e h t e d tim trie the secon re and cloud indus men, political r o f n u r a cent ss acu roud to g the dat s, busine nomy is p h in o g d c u a E o le r a t h e t a r D reak ho a people w ological b n h c e t h talented g ou , be it thr arketing. m l a n direction io t p or exce guidance
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Abhimabyu Bhatter, 30 Senior System Architect Voereir AB Bhatter is an experienced System Architect with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. He is skilled in product development, DevOps, Open Source Integration, Internet Protocol (IP), and Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). While at Ericsson, he served as a senior cloud devops manager, driving Cloud competency, leading multiple Cloud initiatives and driving customer engagements for solution architectures. He was also behind the building of technology stack used by over 17,000 people at Ericsson. In its current organisation at Voereir AB, Bhatter has designed the company’s cloud. With a strong engineering business acumen, Bhatter holds a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Computer Science from the Kumaon Engineering College, Dwarahat.
Alexey Teplukhin, 29 Director - Credit Solutions & Direct Lending Deutsche Bank Teplukhin is in charge of the data centre lending activities at Deutsche Bank in New York and has helped underwrite over $5bn of data centre transactions during his time with the bank. He brings unrivalled enthusiasm to the transactions he works on and has helped finance both small and large companies - from established hyperscalers to retail start-ups. Through his efforts, he has actively increased both Deutsche Bank’s expertise in data centre lending and the overall size of the data centre market as a whole. He continues to expand the bank’s abilities and mandates with respect to data canter financing.
Ashley Hirschbek, 27 Digital Marketing Manager Digital Realty In just 1.5 years at Digital Realty, Hirschbek has continuously improved the process, execution, and output of a significant number of projects, specifically Digital Realty’s recent launch of PlatformDIGITAL. She has been a key player in articulating PlatformDIGITAL’s mission to integrate physical and virtual worlds within proximity to centres of data exchange, interconnected to digital communities of interest and tailored to business needs. Hirschbek’s eager and innovative mindset drives her to identify opportunities for improving results and creating understanding with new and existing customers, with a keen eye on driving revenue by bringing qualified leads into the Digital Realty pipeline.
Blair Felter, 29 Director of Marketing vXchnge A natural leader, since 2017 Felter has built the vXchnge marketing team and established a set of best practices to organically and quantifiably raise vXchnge brand awareness - and win new business. Felter has made customer testimonials and reviews a priority; instinctively seeing “customer experience” as a key differentiator for vXchnge. Moreover, Felter oversaw countless thought-leadership and content initiatives to help build vXchnge into the award-winning company it is today. Other key accomplishments include driving website traffic growth to more 500% YoY, a 2x increase in new customer wins and driving a pipeline with over 65% qualified leads delivered to sales monthly.
Carl Luchettti, 28 Solutions Engineer Flexential Luchettti’s greatest accomplishments at Flexential have been those which have enabled colleagues and customers to better recognise the value and importance of information security. By leveraging his passion for cybersecurity, Luchettti has been able to educate hundreds of people on information security best practices to deliver the best solutions. In addition to helping the internal sales team to better understand the significance of information security through knowledge transfer sessions he also teaches how to better discover the right opportunities for better conversations with our customers. He delivers flexible and tailored solutions that help businesses improve their operations while strengthening their overall security posture.
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Chandler Song, 25 CEO Ankr Song is executing on his vision to bring computing resources to the rest of the world through his start-up, Ankr. Most data centres and cloud availability zones are in wealthy regions like North America, Europe, and Asian cities like Hong Kong, and Singapore. Ankr is like AirBnB for cloud computing, allows anyone to rent out their spare compute through the marketplace. Ankr currently has customers in Africa, Turkey, and smaller Asian countries. Ankr has managed to do two things: first, build a marketplace for bare metal servers, anywhere in the world, and secondly enable cross border payments with cryptocurrency.
Christina Koh, 25 Marketing Manager ST Telemedia Global Data Centre As the key marketing communications lead, Koh has been instrumental in elevating the brand visibility across its markets globally as the STT GDC group grew its footprint through strategic planning of marcoms activities. She has also managed sponsorship events, bespoke events, PR media, content, digital and social media engagement as part of this brand visibility. In addition, she has built the Group’s media reputation through active engagement strategies, enhancing the visibility of our business to customers, partners and investors. Koh is described as an independent worker with an inquisitive mind, willing to take responsibility to deliver on major marcoms initiatives and projects.
Clara Lahiani, 27 Data centre Taxation Researcher Independent Lahiani is a pioneer researcher, tax advisor, author and public speaker on data centre taxation, a key issue for any business going digital. Since being named valedictorian at Sorbonne University, Lahiani has started writing her thesis at University Panthéon-Assas and was appointed visitor researcher at the University of East London (Computing Research Group) in 2017. In mid-2016, she entered the consortium Data Center Eureca Project, an EU Commission thinktank developing research and innovation in the data centre industry. To date, she is the one and only tax researcher in the area of data centres, mixing legal analysis with technical and business knowledge on data centres.
Fundiswa Nkuta, 29 Investment Analyst African Infrastructure Investment Managers Nkuta is an investment analyst at African Infrastructure Investment Managers, a private equity infrastructure fund manager designed to invest long-term institutional unlisted equity in African infrastructure projects. One of Nkuta’s roles at AIIM has been the development of a marketing platform for African Infrastructure projects, with her portfolio having a particular focus on digital infrastructure. Nkuta has been engaging with investors at various ends of the investment spectrum, including global strategic partners and LP’s of the fund. Her role is to educate the international and local community about the developments in the region and assist potential investors in identifying new opportunities.
Gbolahan Olumade, 27 Command Centre and Enterprise IT Engineer Rack Centre Having joined Rack Centre in 2017 as an intern Olumade quickly established himself as a key member of the command centre operations unit. He holds the position of the Command Centre and Enterprise IT Engineer, responsible for monitoring the data centre critical physical infrastructure, execute incident management procedures and provide enterprise IT support. A graduate of electronics and computer engineering, he has helped transform data centre operations and processes using his data analysis and programming language skills. He successfully developed a visitor access management application for the data centre, that resulted in huge cost savings and increased the operational efficiency of the business.
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George Thorp, 28 Data Centre Contracts Manager Emcor During Thorp’s time with facilities management company EMCOR UK he has led the creation of a strong technical team delivering a bespoke service in a challenging environment. The succession planning backed up with mentoring and coaching of his team has created business managers for the future. This has been proven with one of his engineers, who in nine months was moved into a management position and is now a transition manager within the business. One of his many achievements with EMCOR UK was the successful mobilisation and transition of his current contract where all the documentation and processes were mapped out for the clients to aid the swift implementation.
Hayley Godlieb, 26 Project Manager Turner & Townsend Godlieb is a London-based Project Manager in Turner & Townsend’s real estate team and part of the dedicated hi-tech and manufacturing team. Her specific expertise is in data centre programmes and technical projects. She works with a team of project and commercial managers advising on a range of enterprise, cloud and co-location data centre projects within the UK, Europe and globally. She is currently working with a global leader in the data centre sector on some of their highest profile projects. Although not from an engineering background, she has learnt to become proficient and adept in successfully managing projects in resilient and secure environments.
James Coburn, 29 Corporate Development Manager AirTrunk Coburn manages AirTrunk’s business strategy, expansion planning (both new markets and funding), M&A activities and capital raisings. Since joining AirTrunk in July 2018, Coburn has played an integral part of raising over A$1.4bn across three separate financings to support AirTrunk’s rapidly growing footprint in the Asia-Pacific market, including a transformative A$850m financing in August 2018. This successful financing process was undertaken to fund the major expansion of AirTrunk’s Australian data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, and across key Asia-Pacific markets. He previously served at RBC Capital Markets as an Associate advising on M&A, capital raising and capital structure strategy across the infrastructure and technology sectors in APAC. Coburn has a Bachelor of Business majoring in Finance and Accounting, graduating from the University of Technology in Sydney.
James Mitchell-Gears, 29 Partner Account Manager Equinix Gears first entered the data centre industry in April 2013, joining Equinix as a Corporate Sales Executive. He quickly became a critical member of the team, achieving over 100% of his sales target in his first full year. This success included a strategic win with a large financial services customer, where James’ business acumen helped double the spend of that client. Gears was quickly promoted to an Account Manager within the Equinix enterprise sales team, where he achieved over 125% of his annual sales target (2015). Drawing on his in-depth understanding of his customers, Gears has continued to deliver against his targets and has been a consistent top performer of the Equinix UK sales team.
Jeremy Meyers, 28 VP, Real Estate and Infrastructure Business Development EdgeCore Internet Real Estate Meyers joined EdgeCore from CBRE, where under the guidance of Pat Lynch he spent much of his time supporting the integration of CBRE’s global data centre advisory platform, across multiple geographies and different business lines. Jeremy has been an integral part of EdgeCore’s growth, driving enterprise sales and engagement with the real estate advisory community initially, and was recently promoted to an expanded role that includes supporting the needs of hyperscalers globally as well as initiating land acquisition and joint venture activities. He brings a solid real estate foundation in financial analytics and site selection to the EdgeCore team.
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Joachim Kauppi, 29 Director International Sales/ Hyperscale DigiPlex Kauppi has been the Director of International Sales at DigiPlex for just under two years, where he is responsible for the growing and developing of the company’s international markets. Prior to DigiPlex, he spent three years at Equinix as an Account Manager, where he was labelled as ‘Equinix’s secret weapon for the Nordics’. He is a part of DigiPlex’s operations as the data centre company designs, builds and operates sustainable facilities in the Nordic region. He often attends industry conferences and maintains constant contact with industry leaders. Kauppi worked on various data centre related issues and possibilities, including Cloud Express Route back in 2018.
John Dobo, 28 Director Data Center Acquisitions Landmark Dividend Dobo has been involved in the data centre industry since 2016. Prior to Landmark Dividend, he worked in the data centre acquisition group at Carter Validus where he underwrote and assisted in the negotiations of approximately $500m in data centre transactions. Prior to Carter Validus, Dobo worked in the real estate advisory group at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP where he analysed investment opportunities, portfolio properties, and real estate portfolios. At Landmark, he underwrites all potential data centre acquisitions and also sources new potential acquisitions. He attended Florida State University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.S. in Real Estate and Finance.
Joshua Andrews, 26 Data Centre Real Estate Specialist CBRE Andrews specialises as a data centre consultant with a focus on real estate. His focus area includes valuation and strategic advisory, engaging with multiple geographies and operating across EMEA and APAC. Andrews has a breadth of experience in real estate consultancy on all types of data centre assets, from basic shell facilities to data centre development land and complex colocation facilities. He has undertaken work for a variety of purposes including accounting, loan security, acquisition and strategic advice, which has been carried out for a breadth of clients, including data centre operators, as well as lenders and investors into the data centre sector.
Katie Norrell, 29 Management Accountant VIRTUS Data Centres Norrell is a Management Accountant within the Finance team at VIRTUS Data Centres. She has been with VIRTUS for almost five years, and now manages a small team underneath her. She has a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and data centre industry, and is skilled in accounting, cash flow management, variance analysis, financial systems and customer service. Whilst working at VIRTUS, she has been implementing new finance software to improve efficiency in raising and approving invoices and requisitions, improving and implementing new credit control process, managing the cashflow of the business and managing and training new team members.
Lauren Sullivan, 30 Vice President IPI Partners As Vice President at IPI Partners, Sullivan was key in launching STACK INFRASTRUCURE as IPI Partner’s flagship data centre platform investment in its first fund. She also had a role in defining STACK’s corporate strategy, acquired the initial assets in each of STACK’s North American markets and onboarded each of the senior leaders. Sullivan als participated in raising IPI’s second fund. IPI Partners combined facilities acquired from T5 Data Centers with three sites previously owned by wholesale provider Infomart to create a Stack Infrastructure - with 100MW of capacity across six US markets. She has a B.B.A. in Finance from the University of Notre Dame – Mendoza College of Business.
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Nicolas Silva, 24 Technical Program Manager Amazon Silva started a career in the data centre industry with AWS, becoming one of the company’s youngest hires ever at the age of 18. His first position in AWS was as a Data Centre Engineer, where he was based in the company’s Dublin Data Centre. In his former role as Edge Engineer, he was responsible for building edge locations for AWS across the globe, covering EMEA as well as Middle East and India (Chennai). He led over 15 construction projects and deployment for AWS Edge locations, which host services such as Cloudfront, Route53 or Amazon Instant Video (AIV). He also led the deployment of the first AWS locations in the Middle East, in Dubai and Fujairah respectively.
Patrick Bensabat, 28 Solution Engineer Hypertec DCS Bensabat holds an electrical engineering degree from McGill University and is fully licensed in several Canadian provinces. He has designed and managed the construction of multiple complete data centre MEP & infrastructure builds. When Hypertec Group decided to relaunch their data centre business in 2015, he was brought in from the data centre consulting world to act as the lead power engineer and project manager. To date, he has managed projects, programs, teams, and engineered or commissioned, over 40MW of critical IT load for companies across the world. His latest role as a solution engineer has found him partnering with manufacturers globally - from Colombia to the Czech Republic and beyond - to roll out electrical and mechanical data centre solutions.
Raimund Riedl, 26 Investment Banking Associate Citi Riedl has been an Investment Banker in the data centre sector for just under five years. He executed several (announced and ongoing) M&A transactions totalling over $10bn, spanning strategic acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, mergers, and restructurings. Prior to his role at Citi, he was President and Managing Director for Cornell Consulting LLC for three years, and also held the position of President and Chief Investment Officer at MICC Fund LLC. He attended Cornell University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.A.
Rikke Dishington, 21 Service Management Trainee Green Mountain Dishington was hired for a part-time project in the Service Management department at the end of 2018, and was offered the position as Service Management Trainee shortly after. She was assigned responsibility for 30% of Green Mountain’s clients and appointed system administrator for the company’s Service Management System; Service Now. Green Mountain currently offers three data centres in Norway; DC1-Stavanger at Rennesøy just outside Stavanger, DC2-Telemark at Rjukan and DC3-Oslo just 20km outside the capital. In her current role, she manages the system development projects. She works with both incremental developments as well as larger projects such as the newly released maintenance calendar functionality; a feature that gives each client insight into ongoing and executed maintenance work that affects their specific data centre installation.
Samuel Smith, 29 Technical Manager Sudlows As an Uptime Institute accredited tier data centre designer, Smith’s abilities include; Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Mechanical systems design, concept and facility master planning, 3D rendering and video creation for facility walk-throughs. He is skilled in working with the latest Building Information Modelling (BIM) & Revit software for detail design of facilities to LOD 400, testing and commissioning management for critical infrastructure facilities. During a recent project, Smith has chaired and led commissioning meetings for the largest Co-Lo in the UAE. Prior to Sudlows, Smith worked as a Critial Systems Consultant for Sorrento Data Centre Consultancy, part of Sorrento Group.
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Sarah Homewood, 28 PR Manager Colt Technology Services Homewood is a PR Manager at Colt Technology Services, looking after the UK and US regions. When she started at the company, she was a Lead Analyst, but was soon promoted to PR Manager, and played a vital role in Colt’s launch in the US market. She is also a member of Colt’s women’s network Network 25 providing communications support to the team to get the groups’ messages out there, and she also leads the communications for the company’s biggest CSR initiative the Colt Charity Bike Ride. She has a Master’s Degree in Marketing from the University of Sydney and a Bachelor of Communications in Journalism from the University of Technology Sydney.
Sawyer McKelvey, 28 Senior Financial Associate Aligned Energy As Aligned’s Senior Financial Associate, he works closely with senior and executive teams (including Finance, Design & Delivery, Sales, and Human Resources) to help shape Aligned’s strategies and processes. He also works side-by-side with Aligned’s executive leadership and cross-functional division heads to drive various facets of the Company’s Sustainability Program. Prior to his tenure at Aligned, Sawyer worked as an Equity Research Associate at Stifel Financial Corp., where his research spanned six industries in seven years, including data centres, telecommunications infrastructure, towers, airlines, aerospace and defense. Prior to Aligned Energy, McKelvey worked at Stifel Financial Corp. for just under seven years, as a Research Liaison and the as an Equity Research Associate.
Skyler Holloway, 29 Global Data Center Program Manager Facebook Holloway has spent the last five years contributing to the building of data centre facilities, systems, and networks for Facebook, across the U.S. and EU. He began at Facebook during the onset of the company’s rapid global expansion and took on a myriad of roles including; special projects delivery, site developing of technology research stations, new data centre campus builds, and strategy and planning for network connectivity. In addition to his work at Facebook, Holloway plays an active role in promoting the data centre industry and giving back through different initiatives; including serving on the educational committee of Infrastructure Masons. Prior to Facebook, he worked as a Management Consultant for datacenterHawk for two years.
Thomas Morgan, 25 Tender Manager Schneider Electric IT UK Limited Having graduated from Sheffield University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Morgan secured a place within the Schneider Electric graduate scheme in 2016. The graduate process offered him the opportunity to experience five rotations within different Schneider Business units where he experienced different business disciplines. One of these rotations was with the Secure Power Application centre as a Tendering Engineer. He is now managing multi-million-euros complex bids for data centre applications, and was key to the closure of 13 million euros of business for Schneider Secure Power Division. Morgan is also a passionate STEM and regularly attends events in his local area to share his own experiences.
Vatsal Poddar, 27 Finance Business Partner Vertiv Poddar interacts on a daily basis with the C-Level leadership of Vertiv, including the Global CFO, and he is a reference for the whole company when it comes to Business Intelligence, especially Finance. Prior to his role at Veritv, Poddar worked at Clarcor in a Finance Leadership Development Program, where he was selected to work under a non-disclosure agreement to analyse the financial impact of plant consolidations. Prior to that, he worked as a Team Member, Fall Practicum at Citi. He also worked as a trainee Equity Research Analyst for Motilal Oswal Financial Services. He has a Master’s in Finance, Corporate Finance from Washington University in St. Louis – Olin Business School.
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MILLENNIALS AND GEN-ZS WILL SAVE THE WORLD In homage to this year’s 30 Under 30 Data Economy listing, Natalie Bannerman speaks to Bill Kleyman, EVP of Digital Solutions at Switch, and co-chair of the Millennials/Gen-Z Member Resource Group (MRG) at Infrastructure Masons, about the talent deficit facing the wider technology and infrastructure industry, and how Millennials and GenZs are the solution to that problem.
Starting with the work of the Millennials/ Gen-Z MRG, Kleyman says that being part of the group has taught him what true diversity and inclusion (D&I) means. “Diversity is being asked to the dance and inclusion means being asked to dance, so you are actually on the floor and being part of it,” he says. As for the resource group itself, which Kleyman co-chairs with Kacey Armstrong of Vertiv, he says it’s all about creating awareness around infrastructure space and a platform for young people in this sector to speak. “What that means is to try and give a voice to the vision and inspire all of the young people in this world to help them see the kind of things that we can do with technology. And it really doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from you yourself can be a technologist.”
Giving young people a voice to tell the industry and everybody else what they need to be successful, coupled with school outreach at all age levels, is what will drive more to sector and help to solve the growing skills gap. “We do have a challenge where it is a male-dominated, predominately white and in some cases it is ageist you know and I wrote an article recently saying that Millennials and Gen-Zs are sure to save the world and I do firmly believe that,” he adds. One crucial component to the D&I conversation is recruitment and retainment, both of which feed into the larger discussion around culture. As Kleyman pointed out, Milennials and certainly Gen-Zs are less likely to go on to University than previous generations, so the way in which we recruit for them must also change. During a fireside chat with iMasons chairman and founder Dean Nelson, Kleyman remarked that aptitude and attitude should be favoured over experience to attract much needed young talent, a fact that many organisations have yet to catch onto as they continue to look at experience first, followed by attitude and then aptitude, in most cases. “This needs to be turned on its head because you can’t manage this incoming generation that way,” explains Kleyman. “Realistically if you want to shape the most amazing and valuable employee you look at their attitude, so are they positive, are they excited to work for you – do they do their research, then their aptitude, their willingness and ability to learn – that is in my opinion one of the most important things you can get out of a candidate, are willing to learn and grow.” “Then you might want a little bit of experience,” he continues. “But you can shape the experience to make it what you need for your organisation, so you get a valued employee someone who knows they are learning, getting a
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CAREERS INSIDER
Don’t be afraid to ask questions and don’t be afraid to fail.
hands on experience and this is especially important for Gen-Z because guess what some of them might not go to school some of them might just be getting Google or AWS certification.” As for the retainment and culture piece of the jigsaw, Kleyman shares a few key attributes that the Gen-Z worker is looking for in its company of choice. Attributes that the Google’s, Facebooks and Amazon’s of the world, have managed to deliver. “A Gen-Z candidate will absolutely shy away from a company where they had a poor experience, starting even with HR and recruiters not understanding the value a candidate can bring can all impact whether this person actually wants to go work for you or whether or not to stay there. Gen-Zs they do their research. They go on Glassdoor, go on LinkedIn and ask some questions, they check ratings etc. and if you don’t have anything good out there as a brand, you might not be able to recruit good people.” Interestingly, Kleyman shares that unlike the Millennial job hoppers, Gen-Zs are much more interested in future proof careers and job stability – meaning that if you manage to deliver on their needs, they are likely to stay to long-haul. “Retaining them is hard and getting them is hard and it requires a shift in mentality in our industry right now especially in the data centre space. But I definitely think we are getting there,” he says.
STUMBLING UPON THE UNKNOWN Another pearl of wisdom taken from Bill’s fireside chat with Dean, was the realisation that very few enter into the infrastructure space intentionally, rather they stumble upon it. This truth points to a lack of awareness around the sector and could be indicative of a lack of transparency in this field. Questioning Kleyman’s thoughts on this, he shared: “If there is a level of secrecy, I think it is to the determent of the industry,” he says. “You have to get louder and you have to get much more visible, being a secret isn’t great because it leads to misconceptions and people not understanding what companies do.” Part of the problem around this conversation is that some organisations
treat D&I has a box-ticking exercise with very little investment into making them reality. Over at Switch, However, Kleyman says that they have the right way of thinking and are putting it into its hiring practices. “One of our company models is ‘truth in technology’ and I believe this absolutely scales into hiring practices,” he says. “If you are an executive and you are flustered because you can’t get young talent, you should talk to your hiring managers and your recruiters and you should ask them how they are doing this. What is their priority? What are they actually doing to get young talent, because if they are asking the same damn question and they are doing the exactly same thing that they would do for a 20 year for a 40 or 50 year old you are done – that is not going to fly.” One often talked about idea is that of mentors and sponsors, but that’s not what is key in Kleyman’s opinion, he says let’s go even simpler with ‘interaction with the groups that you are trying to diversify’”. “Literally go to a high school and talk to somebody and ask a teacher at a local high school that maybe you went to or your kid goes to and say I work for a really large company and I just want to talk to these kids to make them understand technology and what is possible out there that is a step forward.” As for the lessons he instils in the youth he engages with, among others, Kleyman says, ‘don’t be afraid to ask questions and don’t be afraid to fail’. “You fail fast and you get up even faster, but I think anybody reading this and you are going into technology ask questions, just find good people and ask questions and just try.” But it’s not all doom and gloom, in fact things are getting progressively better as more and more wake up to the realities of this rather inconvenient truth. As we know, good diversity and inclusion programmes can lead to increases in your bottom line, so the reasons to do so are there, we need to push on and give the right people the platform to heard. “It is not great and I think there is a lot of improvement we can do, I still walk into conferences that are heavily male dominated, but I think we are getting there to some extent – it is going to take a generation but I do think we are on a positive trajectory.”
Bill Klayman EVP of Digital Solutions Switch 2019 – Present Advisory Board Member | Digital Marketing Program University of South Florida Muma College of Business 2018 – Present MTM Technologies Current: Advisory Board Member 2011- Present Director of Technology Solutions EPAM Systems 2018 – 2019 Director of Information Technology World Wide Fittings, Inc. 2008 – 2011 Cyberklix Several roles. Last being: Executive Business Developer, Solutions Architect 2006-2008 Corporate Educational Advisor DeVry, Inc. 2004 – 2006 Facility/Pool Coordinator Skokie Park District 1998 – 2006
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INVESTOR RETURNS What do long-term outlooks have in store for investors? As the data centre market consolidation continues at full speed, recent changes in the dynamics of the deals are opening new revenue streams. In this CFO special, we find out what the opportunities are. Privately held SafeHost is one of Switzerland’s largest colocation companies with the ability to scale up to 56MW across its three national facilities currently serving over 140 customers. Founded in 2000, it wasn’t until two years later when the business started to operate. Geneva registered, the company is owned by the directors of the company and an independent investment group with an estimated net worth of $2.5bn. As Data Economy lands in Zurich for this year’s Finvest Summit, João Marques Lima speaks to SafeHost’s CFO Frederic Moeller about the operator’s plans for expansion, the market direction and what the best bets for investors in the data centre world are today.
What are the biggest trends in the European marketplace? The same buzzwords and themes of yesteryear will likely continue to trend for the foreseeable future. Across the industry we will see transaction multiples remaining elevated with some continuing market-driven operator consolidation competing with interest from sovereign wealth and infrastructure funds. There continues to be a trend of increased competitiveness in the European marketplace with a potential race to the bottom on pricing in the FLAP – Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris - markets. We believe strong cloud/hyperscale demand will continue to outstrip available supply in smaller non-FLAP markets. Given some of the recent multiples and a lack of existing accretive investment options, growth favours greenfield
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developments and build-to suits rather than acquisitions. Up until fairly recently a laggard in the cloud/hyperscale take-up, Switzerland is now also benefitting from a strong increase in this demand - and we should see a continuation of the construction boom for the next few years. Sustainability continues its inevitable rise to the top of the agenda. If estimates are correct and the Internet grows to account for 10% of the world’s energy use by the end of the decade, we, as an industry, will come under far greater scrutiny. There is already a growing shift to stronger regulation, and we must continue to proactively engage and prepare ourselves and our customers for that.
What would you point out as the best bets for good investor returns in the next 12 to 24 months? Transaction multiples are elevated and best suited to those with longterm outlooks. We would recommend investors look for agile operators growing organically and with strong, long-term customer relationships. As the European cloud/hyperscale market matures, we may also see a customer-lead consolidation around a reduced group of core developers/operators. Geographically the Nordic market, with its competitive operating costs, remains an interesting opportunity, yet the attractiveness of the sustainability aspect of their business model has the potential to diminish as the ‘hidden’ environmental cost of delivering that data to mainland metropolitan areas remains high.
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We would recommend investors look for agile operators growing organically and with strong, long-term customer relationships. How would you describe Safe Host’s funding model and at what stage is the company at? With new equity partners coming onboard during the course of last year, we are scaling our business rapidly. As we continue our growth trajectory, we are working hard to retain the core entrepreneurial spirit and agility that has driven our success and made us popular with our customers. We have a close and stable working relationship with our Swiss banking partners and debt providers, who have been following us for more than a decade. In tandem with a few developing partnerships with new international financial institutions, we look forward to continuing to evolve our core relationships. We are fortunate to have a number of different capital options available to us, a strong AAA credit-rated customer-base with long-term contracts, and freehold-ownership of all our assets. It is important for us to continue to fully leverage our Swiss base and benefit from this unique position with its advantageous cost of capital.
How much capital has Safe Host raised on top of the $450m by the end of Q2 2019 (according to sources) and what has been the deployment strategy for that capital? We have invested heavily in our domestic market and we are in a good position there. By some regards, we could now be the largest carrier-neutral operator in Switzerland by capacity, and we will continue to make prudent and wellplanned investments on our home ground. By the end of 2020, over 30MW will be fully deployed of which 85% is under long-term contract.
We also have the short-term capacity to organically scale this considerably. In addition, our improved access to capital permits us to move ahead in lock step with our customers’ requirements on other opportunities abroad.
Will you be going out to market looking for more funding in the next 12 to 24 months? Yes, this is a key part of our growth strategy and we are currently engaging in that process.
What are the expansion plans for Safe Host, including outside of Switzerland? Our expansion is being led by customerdriven demand both in our domestic market and in the rest of Europe. We have a proven delivery model that our customers appear happy with and we will continue to evolve our offerings in the coming years.
What is the long-term vision for the business? Safe Host will continue to grow in its local market, either with new partners or organically. We are proud of our Swiss heritage and the unique position this affords us. We will seek to leverage these strengths and core values as we build a pan-European platform. As Safe Host grows into these new markets, it is an integral part of our vision that we continue to focus and lead in sustainable development.
Lastly, how do you see the role of the CFO changing in the digital age? One regularly reads that there has been a rapid evolution in the role of the CFO in recent years. This is absolutely true and there are probably a dozen different answers as to why. To succeed as a finance leader in the digital age we must be able to work cross-functionally and strategically across the organization. There is a growing requirement to meet the increasingly complex and diverging needs of stakeholders, while taking and influencing decisions across numerous aspects of the business. This is well beyond our historic remit. As a CFO of a capital-intensive data centre operator, we oversee simultaneous investments worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In this regard, we are faced more and more with the need to finely balance the naturally risk-averse nature of investors and lenders alongside the customer’s demands for agility, immediate execution and rapid availability.
Frederic Moeller CFO Safe Host SA 2006 – Present Director, Founder Myllenia Group 2000 – 2006 Director, Co-Founder MLI Direct Pty. Ltd. 1996 – 2000
SafeHost Founded in 2000 Operations launched in September 2002 ISO9001 certification awarded in August 2003 Build-out of Business Recovery Centre completed in February 2005 Data Centre upgrade in 2012 ISO27001 certification awarded in October 2013 Aquisition of a new data centre (SH3 - Avenches) in 2015 ISO certifications renewed in 2016 Started the construction of SH2 in 2014 Inauguration of Switzerland’s largest data centre (SH2 Gland) in 2017 PCI DSS certification awarded in August 2017
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FINVEST: FINANCE AND INVESTMENT WATCH
IS TRADE M&A STARTING TO GET MORE INTERESTING? Steve Wallage, MD, BroadGroup Consulting
Investor interest in the data centre sector has soared in recent years – not just in money terms but types of investors. From investor interest mainly coming from traditional investment banks, private equity and property funds, we are seeing interest from a wide variety of groups. This includes sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and broader TMT and infrastructure funds. We are also starting to see more interest from environmental and power infrastructure investors. However, trade M&A has tended to be rather more predictable. It has been typically co-location providers buying similar businesses. It has been about scale and market entry. With, sometimes, a bit of ‘taking out a competitor’ or ‘stopping a larger rival merging’. But this sense of ‘usual suspects’ is starting to widen out. This is happening in two ways’; who the co-location players are buying, and who is buying co-location players? On the first case, a great example is Equinix acquiring Packet.
January 14, 2020
EQUINIX TO ACQUIRE BARE METAL LEADER PACKET Acquisition to accelerate Equinix strategy to help enterprises seamlessly deploy hybrid multicould infrastuctures. The logic is clear. We speak to a lot of enterprises who have seen their internal IT departments shrink horribly, and have very limited cloud skills. They often find the co-location providers a frustrating supplier – they might understand their data centre very well, but expect the enterprise to have much of the expertise and skills. The enterprise also does not want to deal with multiple suppliers. They want providers who can truly help them with their ‘cloud journey’ rather than supply one small piece of the puzzle. From an Equinix perspective, it is not without its challenge. Its 2015 acquisition of Nimbo, a professional services firm, highlighted the issue. The expectation is that a co-location provider is neutral (and not just regarding carriers) and is not pushing a particular solution. The retail co-location providers also have a large number of customers who may suddenly see themselves as potential competitors in some deployments. But the longer-term threat to Equinix is that, if they do make such acquisitions, then they allow others to own the customer and risk being the commoditized infrastructure element.
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Therefore we expect similar such acquisitions as co-location providers seek to expand their enterprise offerings and differentiate from competitors. Who will be next? A number of possibilities, but one interesting angle could be one of the new connectivity providers, such as Megaport. On the second case, will we start seeing other trade buyers acquiring data centre assets? The first signs have been the tower companies dipping their toes into the opportunity which can be roughly defined as ‘edge’. In a 5G/IoT world, do data centre assets suddenly become a lot more attractive? Yet, we have seen many telcos divesting (or planning to divest) data centres, as they seek to raise funds, from Verizon to KPN to Telefonica and Telecom Italia. But developing an ‘edge play’ could lead to further interesting acquisitions and changing business models.
FIRST FORAY INTO DATA CENTRES Another view has been that as mature data centres are seen as safe, diversified and high-yielding plays, then larger infrastructure owners may come in. However, perhaps the most interesting angle is to follow the Equinix/Packet line of thinking. If Equinix can indeed become the ‘home of the hybrid cloud’ and, as so many surveys predict, hybrid cloud is the future of cloud deployments, then will the co-location providers become attractive to any trade buyer keen to be a leader in cloud infrastructure?
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REDEFINING EDGE COMPUTING The global edge computing market is forecasted to reach $8.96 billion by the year 2023, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 32.6% from 2019. But who can win the edge race? Natalie Bannerman meets Axellio.
The need to bring data processing closer to the end user in order to reduce latency and improve user experience, has become the cornerstone for innovations like the internet of things and a key use case for next-gen technologies like 5G
spun off into Axellio. This company was in the enterprise data storage systems space from 1997 and we actually launched the programme within X-IO technologies to develop the capabilities set that Axellio now offers.
One company making a name for itself in this edge computing space is start-up Axellio. Natalie Bannerman speaks to its CEO, Bill Miller about how the company solving the problems unique to this niche and how edge is fast becoming the future of the data centre and cloud sector.
Then almost about 18 months ago we sold our X-IO technology data storage systems business to another enterprise data storage system company called Violin. Axellio is a start-up but it is a derivative of a business that has been sold.
How did you got started with Axellio?
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What sets Axellio apart from its competitors?
We are a little bit unique as a start up in the sense that we are a spin-off of a company that has been around for a while.
The problem space that Axellio focuses on is edge competing systems, which have very different requirements than data centre and cloud infrastructure.
There was a company that our Axellio team had been with for a while called X-IO Technologies and then eventually this was
Some of those requirements are around space, weight, power and portability, as well as being able to configure them
CAREERS INSIDER
Bill Miller
has probably been our biggest challenge over the last 18 months or so, but I think we feel pretty good right now having made that transition.
Founder and General Partner FirstMile Ventures 2008 – Present
We are really starting to operate like a start-up company that is bringing new products to the marketplace and innovating. We are going to have to grow so certainly a challenge that we have ahead of us is finding talent and organising that talent around the problems that we are trying to solve and the markets we are addressing.
Chairman Axellio Inc. 2018 – Present Member of the Board of Directors Altia, Inc. 2011 – Present Member of the Board of Directors FalconStor Software 2016 – Present Member Board of Directors CTI - Chromatic Technologies, Inc. 2014 – Present Managing Partner Miller Investment Management (Colorado) 2008 – Present Chairman and CEO X-IO Technologies 2015 – 2018 Chairman of the Board XAware 2002 – 2009 Member of the Board of Directors Innerwall 2002 – 2007 Member of the Board of Directors PolyServe 2000 – 2007 Member of the Board of Directors Andiamo Systems 2000 – 2004 Founder and CTO StorageNetworks 1997 – 2001 Regional Sales Manager Andataco 1993 – 1997 VP of Engineering and Operations CERAM, Inc. 1990 – 1993 Product Line Manager National Semiconductor 1988 – 1990 Co-founder, VP Process Engineering Krysalis Corp 1985 – 1988 Process Engineer Signetics 1982 – 1985
to deal with different environments, different network and communications infrastructures. We are currently finishing the development of a system under contract with the US air force for a dense and very configurable computing infrastructure system that actually fits into a case the size of a regulation carry-on piece of luggage. It is the ability to take your data centre with you in a suitcase, put it on the overhead on an airline and set it up when you land, which is amazing. Then the other area that we are really focused on is the security and network operations space. We now have a unique architecture that we use that allows you to capture and store full packet capture all packets and then index them as you are capturing them. Then you can run sophisticated analytics under the same system, which allows you to, for example, hunt for threats, cyber-attacks etc.
How do you see the infrastructure market evolving over the next 5-10 years? Most of the growth and innovation in the last decade, has been largely driven by the migration of infrastructure to the cloud. I actually think the next 10 or even 20 years will be largely driven by the emerging need for more infrastructure at the edge. This is being driven by things like 5G and the internet of things, smart autonomous devices and there are all these things that we are going to be doing that require the computing and the storage and capture of data to be away from the cloud data centres.
What has been your biggest obstacle so far and how did you overcome that? Certainly for us, having sold our enterprise data storage business, which was a larger business and having a good part of our team go with that transaction and being left with a smaller team that we had to reorganise and run like a start-up, has caused a shift in the way we operate and in the culture of the company. That
How much have you raised in funding, and what do you plan to do with that investment? We are a little bit unique in this sense as well because we came out of an existing business that we sold, and we actually used the proceeds of that sale put on our balance sheet to finance the development of Axellio. We also kept and bought with us a lot of assets that were in the prior company that were not sold. If I look at the value of the assets that we kept plus the proceeds that we got it is tens of millions in value. We really haven’t had to raise additional funding as a result of having had the capital of the transaction and the assets that we kept, but in terms of what we are doing with it – we are beginning to scale up. We are still investing in product and market development and building those customer relationships in those niches and we are having to invest a lot in building our operational capability to serve the requirement of those customers so I wouldn’t be surprised if we needed to raise some additional capital in the future to finance kind of more rapid acceleration of the market niches that we are proving out and beginning to grow faster.
What is the roadmap for the company over the next 12 months? There are two. One is to complete this contract that we have with the air force to build this product that we call FX-BLOX and this is the data centre in a suitcase portable system, so we will complete that over the course of the year and we will deliver that to our defence customers. The second priority is really to bring our packet capture analytic solutions more broadly to market. We have a few key core customers that are deploying those solutions today and we have been working with our customers to learn a lot about their requirements and expand on that in the product to meet those requirements. We will be bringing that to the market for more efficient highspeed packet capture analytics over the course of this year.
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BREAKING INTO THE DATA CENTRE SECTOR Finding a way to break into the data centre industry fresh out of university is not as easy as some of the more conventional job roles out there. The sector is laced in many different fabrics, that all work hand in hand in the task of housing the whole world’s IT technology innovation universe. Christopher Stumm, business development manager global data centers, NTT Ltd
As daunting as that may sound for some, this was the very reason why Christopher Stumm, Business Development Manager, Global Data Centers at NTT Ltd. chose the industry seven years ago at the age of 19. He describes the data centre sector to Abigail Opiah as “the hub that houses the digital world”, adding that the increase in digitalisation is what will keep him in the industry for years to come. “The data centre industry is interesting because it’s something like the home of so many different infrastructures of different industries. You have the whole IT and technology innovation universe at one point, which is something that you don’t have when working for one specific vendor,” he says. “That is something that makes the data centre unique - having a platform that is the house or foundation for a wide set of technologies and innovation. Everything is becoming digital and IT-based as we can see in our private lives, which is one of the main growth drivers of the data centre industry.” The Frankfurt-based data centre business developer studied BA Business Informatics at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, began his career at HP, moved to Hewlett Packard Enterprise and is now settled at NTT Ltd. who recently announced a new Global Data Centers division, which incorporates its
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e-shelter, Gyron, Netmagic, NTT Indonesia Nexcenter, RagingWire and other data centre companies. “I am mainly responsible for the socalled technology experience labs at NTT, and these labs are a globally available environment, which is a part of a productive data centre site of an NTT data centre, and it’s a platform that is filled with a lot of technology partners,” explains Stumm. “At the moment, we have over 140 partners that we are collaborating with, and it’s filled with cutting edge technology like hybrid cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and Internet of Things (IoT). Everything that is in there has been built up over the last two years, thus it’s an instrument that is not too old, and this platform is done to serve clients as a testing platform so that they can explore different technologies and find the right one for their specific requirements. We began this two years ago with a lab in Frankfurt, and since then decided to roll out in different regions in the world where NTT data centres are operated.” When asked about what the typical career journey into the data centre industry from university looks like, Stumm says that from a technical perspective, there is a high demand for engineering, but in terms of technology, it is helpful to have a Business Informatics background.
“Looking at the path of the data centre, quite a lot was facility driven, but over the last couple of years, almost everybody is aware of the positions that are coming into the data centre in terms of cloud requirements, latency requirements and bandwidth requirements,” he adds. “It’s not only about the pure facility, or the cooling or power, it’s more about business informatics’ driven sector. Studying informatics is quite helpful to get started in the data centre sector and understand the holistic picture. With the industry evolving, Stumm adds that one of the most significant trend he is witnessing in the industry is AI. “AI is coming into every single industry, and enterprise AI workloads are very GPU driven, which is a perfect example of how technology is being translated into the data centre itself,” he concludes. “These GPU based infrastructures usually come with a really high density, which means that they need a huge amount of power and cooling in a hybrid way. Connecting to cloud environments for example, these environments will need a huge bandwidth and low latency, which is very visible in the data centre industry. “In the next five years, I plan to still be in the data centre industry because I think the sector has a bright future because of the rising demand for data centres.”
CAREERS INSIDER
EXECUTIVE MOVES Businesses across the globe are readying themselves for the next decade which is expected to bring with it a lot of business expansion. With a growing industry, executives shifting roles across the board has become a constant. João Marques Lima lists some of the most recent moves of 2020.
Lenovo Data Center Group appoints Giovanni Di Filippo as EMEA President
Reporting to CEO Frank J Vella, the company said that McNerney will drive the organisation’s marketing and communications strategy.
global internet, cloud and data centre development, driving transformation supporting business and customer demands worldwide.
Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) has appointed Giovanni Di Filippo as President, Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
With nearly 30 years of experience, McNerney will focus on driving greater brand awareness, scaling a global demand-generation organisation, and mobilising a community of passionate customers and partners that rely on the Information Builders platform.
Netrality Data Centers appoints Amber Caramella as Chief Revenue Officer
The company said that Di Filippo will drive the business in the EMEA region and build on relationships with data centre partners and customers. Before Lenovo DCG, Giovanni was VP of EMEA for Channels, Sales & Strategic Alliances with Riverbed Technology.
IBM’s Ginni Rometty steps down as CEO causing major executive reshuffle IBM CEO Ginni Rometty announced that she will resign from her role and be replaced by the company’s current Senior Vice President for Cloud and Cognitive Software. The IBM Board of Directors has elected Arvind Krishna as Chief Executive Officer of the company and a member of the Board of Directors, effective April 6, 2020. Krishna is currently IBM Senior Vice President for Cloud and Cognitive Software and was a principal architect of the company’s acquisition of Red Hat.
Information Builders hires Carol McNerney as chief marketing officer Data and analytics firm Information Builders has announced the appointment of Carol McNerney as chief marketing officer (CMO).
DigiPlex appoints Wiljar Nesse as CEO to capitalize on Nordic data centre advantages Nordic data centre operator DigiPlex has announced that Wiljar Nesse has been appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer, effective March 1, 2020. Nesse succeeds Gisle M. Eckhoff, who after five years, will retire from his role as CEO, but will remain with the company as an advisor to the Board. Nesse recently served as Executive Vice President Financial Services at TietoEVRY, and was also previously Executive Vice President Financial Services at EVRY as well as EDB ErgoGroup/EDB.
Chayora appoints Yali Z. Liu as Executive Vice President, Network & Strategy Hong Kong based data centre firm Chayora has appointed Yali Z. Liu as the company’s Executive Vice President, Network & Strategy. Liu joined Chayora at the beginning of the new year as Executive Vice President responsible for network connectivity products and solutions, and a member of the Management Board of Chayora.
Netrality Data Centers has announced that Amber Caramella has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer. In this new role, Caramella will be responsible for the company’s revenue generation strategy and execution, including overseeing sales, marketing, strategic alliances and channel partnerships. Prior to joining Netrality Data Centers, Caramella served as Senior Vice President of Sales at Zayo, where she built the company’s global data centre vertical team.
Talend hires Anne Hardy for newly created role as Chief Information Security Officer Cloud data integration company Talend has announced the appointment of Anne Hardy its Chief Information Security Officer. The role is new and was created to address the increased security requirements when engaging in modern enterprise cloud IT environments, according to the company. Hardy will be responsible for Talend’s security strategy, managing security threats and vulnerabilities across Talend people, technologies and processes, and ensuring compliance with relevant security and privacy laws.
She has over 15 years of strategic and operational leadership experience in
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BUSINESS LIFESTYLE
Tech book watch list Reading is like a vacation for the mind that should be enjoyed by all. With that being said, Abigail Opiah lists six must-reads that every tech executive should have on their bookshelves (physical or digital). Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction Author: Thomas Siebel The book is a deep examination of the new technologies that are disrupting business and government, and how organisations can harness them to transform themselves into digital enterprises. The confluence of four technologies - elastic cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) - writes Siebel, is fundamentally changing how business and government will operate in the 21st century. The author guides readers through a unique discussion of the game-changing technologies driving digital transformation, and provides a roadmap to seize them as a strategic opportunity.
Blockchain Maximalist: The Very Structure of Society is About to Change. Author: Luis Wester In Blockchain Maximalist, Wester establishes a firm technological and historical foundation on which he builds a “vibrant landscape of futuristic applications” with monumental economic, political, and societal relevance. The first part of the book elaborates blockchain in the context of its encompassing history. Wester takes you by your hand and inspects all major breakthroughs, achievements, and milestones throughout the blockchain journey, up until 2019. Throughout the book, you will explore: how blockchain functions, which components make up blockchain, where the technology comes from, and what it means for the individual and society.
Fog and Edge Computing: Principles and Paradigms Author/s: Rajkumar Buyya and Satish Narayana Srirama Responding to the ever-increasing bandwidth demands of the IoT, Fog and Edge computing concepts have developed to collect, analyse, and process data more efficiently than traditional cloud architecture. Fog and Edge Computing: Principles and Paradigms provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art applications and architectures driving this dynamic field of computing while highlighting potential research directions and emerging technologies. Exploring topics such as developing scalable architectures, moving from closed systems to open systems, and ethical issues arising from data sensing, this timely book addresses both the challenges and opportunities that Fog and Edge computing presents.
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The Cloud Adoption Playbook: Proven Strategies for Transforming Your Organisation with the Cloud Author: Roland Barcia, Ndu Emuchay, Moe Abdula, Kyle Brown, and Ingo Averdunk Adopting the cloud requires a clear roadmap backed by use cases, grounded in practical real-world experience, to show the routes to successful adoption. The Cloud Adoption Playbook helps business and technology leaders in enterprise organisations sort through the options and make the best choices for accelerating cloud adoption and digital transformation. Written by a team of IBM technical executives with a wealth of real-world client experience, this book cuts through the hype, answers your questions, and helps you tailor your cloud adoption and digital transformation journey to the needs of your organisation.
Cloud Native Patterns: Designing Change-tolerant Software Author:Cornelia Davis Going to “the cloud” is more about how you design your applications than where you deploy them. CloudNative Patterns: Designing ChangeTolerant Software is your guide to developing strong applications that thrive in the dynamic, distributed, virtual world of the cloud. This book presents a mental model for cloud-native applications, along with the patterns, practices, and tooling that support their construction. In it, you’ll find realistic examples and expert advice for working with apps, data, services, routing, and more. The author often makes reference to differences between the patterns she covers in the book and the way in which things may have been done in the past.
Up and Running: Dive Into the Future of Infrastructure Author: Brendan Burns, Joe Beda, and Kelsey Hightower Kubernetes radically changes the way applications are built and deployed in the cloud. Since its introduction in 2014, this container orchestrator has become one of the largest and most popular opensource projects in the world. The updated edition of this practical book shows developers and ops personnel how Kubernetes and container technology can help you achieve new levels of velocity, agility, reliability, and efficiency. All three authors – who have worked on Kubernetes at Google and beyond—explain how this system fits into the lifecycle of a distributed application. The book teaches you how to use tools and APIs to automate scalable distributed systems, whether it’s for online services, machine learning applications, or a cluster of Raspberry Pi computers.
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EDGE GLOBAL AWARDS SANTA MONICA LAUNCHING IN SEPTEMBER 2020
