Last month I had the pleasure of attending Capacity Europe in London – one of the key trade shows within the European digital infrastructure sector, and an important venue to meet with our industry colleagues and partners.
With so much of my day-to-day work conducted via Teams or Zoom nowadays it’s always good to have an excuse to get out from behind the screen and meet people face-to-face. It’s also good to get a taste as to what is interesting, new and developing in the industry and the topics that are the buzz on the trade show floor.
For example, the conference gave us the first opportunity to meet Jesus Alonso and Adonis Chan at the ‘Telefonica’ exhibition stand – two contacts I’ve only had email communication with previously. Putting a face to a name is so important and as relatively new face in the sector, it was also good to have my colleague Mark Putt with me, or ‘Putty’ as everyone knows him. It’s hard to find someone who knows the industry better than Mark and he’s the type of character that everyone warms to and wants to reconnect with. Kao Data couldn’t have a better ambassador at a trade show.
One thing that really hit both Mark and I was the palpable enthusiasm for Kao Data’s success to date and what our future expansion plans hold. Everyone was aware of our current development plans in Stockport, thanks to the recent efforts of our marketing team and having had the Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, outwardly supporting our data centre plans up there. It’s clear there is a lot of development planned for the Manchester to Leeds corridor, as well as a significant shift in compute from West London to the north and east – the repercussions of which we’re seeing in Harlow.
A key talking point with carriers and suppliers in discussions at the show was the development of ‘next tier’ locations around the UK and Europe. I had some great discussions with Louis and Dylan at Medusa/AFR-IX telecom on this – what they are seeing in Barcelona around the development of their new landing station and the type of workloads being prioritised for that new fibre. New carrier access points in the European connectivity framework are really re-shaping how the industry works especially with the advent of AI training workloads.
Talking about Europe – many carriers were obviously curious to understand where on the European continent Kao Data will be heading. Our CEO, Doug Loewe has outlined ‘7 Dots’ we’re targeting and we’ve got some exciting plans being worked on. However all I could share at this point was having done customer implementation projects in Slough and Harlow, I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to take that day job to some of Europe’s most exciting and beautiful cities – it will certainly beat my M25 commute!
Away from the conference, it remains a busy period for Howard and I in the customer implementation team as we continue to navigate around a variety of regular challenges, whether this is getting specific infrastructure in via our supply chain (especially given the heightened demand we are seeing for everything right now) or helping our cloud and enterprise customers deploy their hardware in a timely fashion. Like Putty, Howard’s reputation for getting the job done proceeds him in the industry and it’s great to be supporting him, especially given the demand for colo is enormous and that’s only been increased with the industrial scale AI compute we’re being tasked to accommodate.
Thinking internally, it’s also been fantastic to have recently had Pete Judson join us to spearhead the COO function as we scale-up our development. Pete is another one of those characters who is highly respected in the industry and has done it all before. There is so much to learn from what he’s done previously and inspiring to have someone of his calibre join the company. Like Howard, he’s a great person to talk with and it’s invaluable to have a clear line-of-sight on what’s pressing, the challenges that need to be resolved and the order of the day.
I should also take this opportunity to say it’s been fantastic to work with Paul Finch as well, who now gets to fully concentrate on the design side of the business as CTO. If anyone personifies all the great things about Kao Data and how it’s evolved, it’s Paul. It doesn’t matter who you speak to, or where you speak to them – if you mention Paul, everyone has something positive to say about him – just like the industry’s view of Kao Data.
