Data Centres Development Conference

Equinix – Russell Poole, Managing Director, UK

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company, enabling digital leaders to harness a trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success. They have grown into a £1.8 billion company operating over 210 data centres on five continents.

With 13 Data centres in London and Manchester totalling almost 850,000 sq ft of colocation space, they are one of the UKs leading data centre operators. Russell will discuss their plans for growth and expansion and the sectors growing importance to the UK economy.

Tech UK – Emma Fryer, Associate Director, Data Centres

Emma leads the data centre programme for technology sector trade body techUK, representing the interests of UK operators to Government and other stakeholders. She influences policy, mitigates compliance burdens, alerts the sector to risks and manages specialist groups, including the UK Council of Data Centre Operators.

She negotiated a Climate Change Agreement for the sector in 2014, worth over £200M to UK operators and continues to lobby hard on behalf of the industry on issues ranging from energy costs to regulatory compliance. Most recently she negotiated key worker status, protection for construction sites and quarantine exemption for data centre staff and contractors during COVID-19 and continues to work closely with UK government on sector resilience.

She produces thought leadership, policy responses, white papers, briefings and infographics covering topics from generator emissions to Brexit. Recent outputs include a Sector Energy Routemap, a discussion paper on the challenges of attributing carbon to cloud services, and a sector market overview.

TechRE – Henry Sutton, Associate Director

TechRE are a sector leading voice who advise on data centre investment and development and have been involved with some of the UKs biggest data centre projects. Henry is known globally for helping major organisations and public sector bodies solve their complex data storage needs. He will help visualise the data centre development landscape and be on hand to advise of forthcoming challenges and opportunities within the sector and advise our audience how they could position their business to break into the market.

CBRE – Penny Madsen-Jones, Director, EMEA Data Centre Research

Penny leads CBRE’s research into the European Data Centre Market and is an expert on the state of the market, development picture and future trends. She will provide some thought leadership on the state of Data Centre development in 2021, and discuss how there is potential for huge growth if building can resume, after a levelling of over the last year.

Host in Scotland – James King, Founder & Chairman

Host In Scotland is an umbrella organisation which represents and promotes the interests of the Scottish data centre industry. It is funded by the Scottish Futures Trust and Scottish Government and aims to secure new investment in the sector, from existing operators wishing to expand or new entrants to Scotland. James will discuss the data centre investment and development picture in Scotland and the increasingly important role the sector plays in the country’s economy.

Principal Global Investors – Paul Lewis, Director – European Data Centres

Principal Real Estate are continuing their massive datacentre investment plans having recently closed a £131 million data centre fund, which beat its initial target. The money will be used for manage-to-core data centres, with 60 percent to be spent in the key European data centre markets including Germany, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Since entering the data centre market in 2007, Principal has committed over £1.48 billion in data centre acquisitions and developments worldwide and owns c.£1 billion in data centre REITs. Paul leads on Principal’s European Data Centre operations and will be on hand to discuss their future data centre investment plans in the UK.

Gowling WLG – Nick Mumby, Partner

Nick Mumby advises in relation to all aspects of real estate work, with a particular expertise in complex development projects. He has acted on acquisitions, disposals, developments, planning, leasing, financing and the real estate aspects of corporate transactions.

Nick has worked extensively for corporate vehicles (especially Luxembourg structures) and property funds. He also advises institutional development companies, house-builders, debt-funds and family offices. His experience of acting for both developers and lenders has given him a deep insight into the differing requirements of the various parties and allows him to identify the issues which may arise.

Built Environment Networking – Amanda Griffiths, Director

Amanda is one of the Co-Founder’s of Built Environment Networking – formed almost 10 years ago.

She’ll be hosting throughout the day, running the days proceedings and managing the interaction between our delegates and the speakers.

Procore – Brandon Oliveri-O’Connor, Director of EMEA

Brandon has been with Procore since 2015, supporting the company’s growth throughout the world. He started in the company’s Austin office before stints in Vancouver and Sydney. Having launched Procore’s London office in 2018, he is focussed on furthering Procore’s global reach across Europe.

When he joined the Austin office, Brandon was the fifth employee. It is now Procore’s second-largest office with over 200 staff. His experience there, alongside his time in Canada and Australia, provided a detailed understanding of the global construction sector and the challenges of entering new markets.

He believes that Procore’s culture of partnering with clients will deliver real change in the construction industry, by helping companies use technology to improve quality, productivity and site safety.

Procore – Grayson Galloway, Account Executive

Grayson Galloway comes with many years of experience of successfully managing high-revenue organisations within the enterprise software industry. Formerly of Enterprise Cloud leader, Cloudera, Grayson has worked with $1billion revenue clients across a range of industries across telecom, hospitality and financial services. Now in the construction industry, he has spent the last three years as a founding member of Procore Technologies’ rapidly growing London-based EMEA team, building its client base and establishing the company as a leader within construction technology.