Fostering regional economic growth and enabling businesses to interconnect and innovate securely is a priority for modern data centre providers . Acutely aware of the pace of change , Wendy Shearer ,

Director Partners and Ecosystems at Pulsant , discusses the company ’ s expansion of its Edge Partner Programme to create a robust collaborative ecosystem and highlights the importance of such ecosystems being vital to powering the AIdriven economy .

Fundamentally , we are a data centre provider but that doesn ' t make us different – there ' s lots of those in the UK . How we see ourselves as different is that all our data centres are interconnected , so we have 12 data centres across the UK all interconnected in a network fabric and we also provide regional Edge compute .

Pulsant Platform Edge is a combination of all three factors we offer , ultimately digital infrastructure options for all our clients and partners .

How do you ensure the sustainable build and growth of Pulsant ’ s Edge Partner Programme and regional ecosystems across the UK ?

There are two angles to this – the topic is always about sustainable data centres . Data centre industries have a bit of a PR problem because the headlines are usually about the negative aspects of having data centres in communities because of the power build .

We are continuously evolving the sustainable nature of our data centres , constantly looking at how we power and cool them and what new innovations and technology we can incorporate from an environmental perspective .

The other angle to is about the sustainability of growing out an Edge partner programme . My plan is to achieve that over at least the next three years . And whilst you always want to do everything all at once , building that out in a sustainable way and growing a solid foundation , which we ' ve done this year , is key . This is a brand-new programme for Pulsant .

We ' ve always treated our clients the same ; whether you ' re a bank , a supermarket or a managed service provider , you ’ re ultimately a client and using our platforms . We ’ re now thinking about the service providers completely separately from the end-user clients because they have a different set of needs .

This year has been about creating the structure for the programme , recruiting a team and understanding what people want from a programme like this . Next year will be about building out the market ecosystem and trying to sustain that growth over the next three to five years .

What is a collaborative ecosystem and why should companies want to operate this way ?

To understand this , we must first consider the evolution of the technology landscape . Traditionally , colocation providers wouldn ' t care too much about what ' s going on in the racks within their data centres because we normally operate more like real estate . You consider how much space and power is required and then what ' s inside that is up to you .

What ’ s different about the way we ' re doing things now is if you think about the evolution of the service provider landscape , maybe rewind 20 years ago and you had the huge System Integrators ( SIs ) who did everything . People were focused on managing their hardware and software

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