DEEP DIVE
physical side of things.
But nobody is teaching
that and organisations
that rely on those skills
end up running their
own courses.
In universities they’re
still focused on electrical
engineering or mechanical
engineering as a specific
discipline. But you have to
join the IT and engineering
side together at all levels.
When universities start
offering schools of study
where you can’t tell the
difference between an IT
person and an engineer I think
they’ve got it.
How do you deal with
stress and unwind outside
the office?
Injury aside, I would play tennis
once a week but I have got three
very young children – a five, four
and two year old.
Other than that, reading, music and
the occasional computer game.
What do you currently
identify as the major areas of
investment in your industry?
For me it would be workforce
development and capability. I chair a
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
special interest group on this with the Data
Centre Alliance (DCA) and what we are
really keen to do is get people to take a
bigger interest in wanting to inspire today’s
children to want to study technology and
engineering and maths and science and see
it as a career – their career!
Whatever we can do, however we can do
it – it just needs a lot of very passionate
people. So it’s got to be homegrown. You
can’t wave a magic wand at it. People
need to want to do it and they need to
have the resources to do it and the time.
That’s where the investment should
be, especially when we have so much
uncertainty over Brexit about where we’re
going get tomorrow’s resources from as we
might not have this talent pool in Europe to
pull from so companies will struggle unless
they can generate that from home.
What are the region-specific
challenges you encounter in
your role?
Most of the work I do is European. GDPR
and Brexit have driven some organisations
to rethink their Data Centre Strategy and
then there’s the differences between
Northern Europe, Southern Europe and
UK/Ireland in terms of product.
In the Nordic countries, for instance, they
have a very similar product. They’re trying
to sell data centres on the fact they have
this large renewable energy and low cost
cooling product.
But the network, the backbone Internet
connectivity, is one of the crucial elements
to a good data centre product and if you
don’t have that then you are going to
struggle to attract large enterprises.
What changes to your job role
have you seen in the last year and
how do you see these developing
in the next 12 months?
After a lot of talk about cloud, which
we kind of ignored at first as it was a
lot of hyperbole for quite a long-time,
it has started now to become a serious
consideration in terms of most companies’
IT estates – but many are still quite
nervous about it.
They know they need to use cloud but
are unsure about how they connect
it up to their existing on-premise
infrastructure. Cloud requires a very
different support paradigm because you
are relying much more on a 3rd party
and your network connection to it, so
you need very good IT service contract
managers which organisations don’t tend
to have.
What advice would you offer
somebody aspiring to obtain a
senior position in the industry?
Have a passion for what you do. Find a role
that you enjoy, that really inspires you and
if you feel like you can make a difference,
then that should be enough to motivate
you to want to be the best at it. ◊
Issue 03
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