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Significant moments in 2019 for DCA Corporate Partners

Significant moments in 2019 for DCA Corporate Partners

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As we move into a new year the DCA looks at some of its Corporate Members’ significant moments from 2019

As we move into a new year, the DCA looks at some of its Corporate Members’ significant moments from 2019.  We had so many contributions that we have been unable to include all the information – but we have provided some of the headlines and links to the rest of the details.

The DCA’s membership base is varied and includes providers of products and services to the sector, data centre owners and operators, consultants and training organisations. The DCA exists to support all its members and to raise both their profiles and the profile of the industry.

Highlights for Corporate Partners in 2019

TechBuyer

TechBuyer is a global leader in the buying, refurbishing and selling of data centre equipment.

2019 has been another interesting and rewarding year for Techbuyer. The company has committed to a number of long-term research projects which aim to generate some useful information and tools for the sector going forwards.

Began KTP with the University of East London

July saw the beginning of Techbuyer’s two-year Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP) in partnership with the University of East London. The research project aims to revolutionise the way data centre managers think about IT hardware configuration. Creating a tool that will allow modelling energy efficiency in data centres with optimal hardware configuration will enable everyone to make best use of resources. The first phase of the research yielded ground-breaking results, which were shared at DCW Frankfurt in November, on the performance of older generations against new.

Presentation at Data Centre World Frankfurt

Nour Rteil and Rich Kenny from the KTP team presented and demonstrated their bench-marking process and results for older and newer generation servers at DCW Frankfurt in November. Initial findings exposed a huge energy efficiency increase from obtaining balanced memory configuration. The optimal memory configuration depends not only on the total memory capacity, but also the number of channels populated and types of DIMMs used. 

Launched IT asset disposition section of the company

Techbuyer kicked off the new year with the launch of a new section of the business devoted to IT asset disposition, a specialised service that provides a secure removal and certified data sanitisation to data centre customers. Simply put, it is a secure and environmentally responsible solution to retiring IT infrastructure.

Opened technical facility and sales office in France

Techbuyer continued the fast rate of change by opening a technical facility and sales office in Paris, France, in February. The sixth of its international operations, the French operation also expanded the company’s product range to include PCs and laptops; an area in which the team there have a lot of expertise.

Listed in Sunday Times Fast Track 200

Techbuyer was ranked mid-table in the Sunday Times Fast Track in February, a recognition of its fast-growing international sales. With facilities in the USA, Germany, New Zealand, Australia and France, Techbuyer has exported to over 100 countries and has a sales team that speak seven languages. Techbuyer rated 102nd overall and was one of the top 10 in Yorkshire.

Electrical Review Award for WindCORES project

Techbuyer was delighted to win Sustainable Project of the Year at the Electrical Review Excellence Awards in London in June, just a few weeks after shortlisting as Data Centre Energy Efficiency Project of the Year at the DCS Awards. The project in question was in partnership with German green energy company WestfalenWind, which furnished a wind powered data centre inside a windmill with refurbished servers.

Partnership with IT Schools Africa

As a company, Techbuyer has a commitment to closing the loop on equipment use wherever it can. IT Schools Africa is a wonderful organisation that enables its IT asset disposition (ITAD) service to do that. Some of the equipment collected by the ITAD division – mice, keyboards and monitors for example – is not part of its core inventory and not profitable to sell. Rather than send it for recycling, it has made contact with IT Schools Africa, who test and refurbish all equipment before shipping for a second life in African schools.

Support of UN Sustainable Development Goals

In October, Techbuyer officially announced its support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals with nine targets set against Goal 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), Goal 4 (Quality Education) and Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).

Panel discussions at DCA’s Data Centre Re-Transformation and DCD London

Techbuyer was invited to take part in the ‘journey towards a circular economy for the data centre industry’ panel discussion at DCD London in November along with other members of the CEDaCI project. Bringing together different participants in the value chain was a great way to begin the journey that will turn ‘e-waste’ into ‘e-resource’ in the coming years. With approximately 121 million server units set to be deployed between 2019 and 2025, finding better ways of reusing and recycling will be vital for the sector.

The company also joined the conversation on ‘Building a Circular Economy’ at the DCA’s Data Centre Re-Transformation conference in Manchester in September. Speaking alongside Tech UK, Green IT, the Uptime Institute and BEIS, it was amazing to see the level of dedication in the industry towards finding an alternative to the traditional ‘take, make, waste’ approach to data centre provisioning. 

Mick Payne, Managing Director, Techbuyer said: “We are looking forward to building on these projects in the coming year and also hearing about the exciting developments in the data centre sector.”

Datum

Datum delivers environmentally intelligent colocation and data centre services underpinned by a highly secure and highly available, carrier-neutral environment.  Datum is also a founding member of the DCA and has been a member since 2010. Financially, Datum is showing above-market revenue growth and in June 2019 the company’s success was reflected in its calendar year 2018 accounts, which showed their first EBITDA profit. Datum was also thrilled when the results of a client survey (published in July) revealed it had achieved a world-class category Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 91.

This demonstrates a very high likelihood that Datum clients would recommend Datum to their peers or colleagues. In December 2019, Datum was shortlisted for the Best Performing Company (Data Centre and Hosting Services) award in the 2020 Megabuyte Emerging Stars Awards.

The Emerging Stars awards are an independent ranking of the UK’s best-performing technology scale-ups as defined by Megabuyte’s proprietary Megabuyte Scorecard benchmarking methodology. They celebrate the achievements of the UK’s 25 best performing tech scale-ups against five financial criteria including size, growth and margins. 

Where do we go from here?

After such an incredible year in 2019 – now with over 50 clients, revenue close to £5m and another year of 20% growth – the company is keen to take its successes and use them as a springboard to further achievements in 2020.

The dust settled on the retirement of the company’s inimitable Marketing Manager in October and two new members of staff have been welcomed to the growing team during 2019: Melissa Munday and Aanisa Allali-Williams.

Aanisa will be taking over as Business Administrator and Melissa will be stepping into Linda Martino’s shoes as Client Service Manager from January 2020 when Linda  retires to the West Country.

Looking ahead to the new year, the company has some exciting growth plans up its sleeves. Alongside its existing ground floor data centre, it has prepared its upper floor shell and core as a space that is available for custom technical design. Clients who build out this space to their desired specification will continue to benefit from Datum’s existing high service levels, established connectivity and its ultra-secure location within a List X park.

Teledata

Teledata provides colocation services to a range of sectors throughout the UK. The company has made several exciting announcements this year including investment of a six-figure sum into the CloudActiv platform, which provides customers with truly resilient cloud hosting and effective disaster recovery of business-critical data and applications.

It has also invested £1.5 million in a new battery storage system to enhance energy efficiencies and £125K to update logical and physical security systems at their facility close to Airport City in Wythenshawe. Teledata also became a PoP (Point of Presence) for London Internet Exchange (LINX).

For more information, visit teledata.co.uk/

Procurri

Procurri is a leading global independent provider of IT lifecycle services and data centre equipment with an extensive reach spanning more than 100 countries. Earlier this year Procurri announced the opening of a new office in Germany. Procurri’s newest European base is in Erlangen, Germany, Europe’s largest economy. This new location will service not just those doing business in Germany, but also those in the UK with European operations.

Procurri offers a full supply chain management service, allowing customers to enhance and streamline their global distribution value chain through outsourcing it and taking advantage of Procurri’s experience and existing strategic relationships in the space. Furthermore, their unique reverse logistics framework allows for hardware resale to buy, sell or consign data centre equipment through asset trade-in and buy-back programmes.

Lifecycle-wise, Procurri’s new German presence will work in support of all three existing service strands. These are Independent Maintenance Services to extend support for out-of-warranty and end-of-life IT equipment running across a 24×7 global helpdesk network; hardware supply, new authorised parts, refurbished parts and complete systems and ITAD (IT Asset Disposition) to complement the overall value chain through an end-to-end suite of offerings.

The new German Procurri warehousing operation compliments the firm’s 14 locations across three regions: EMEA, Americas and APJ, servicing over 100 countries worldwide.

EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) is a key region and this new European presence will strive to strengthen and improve service levels even higher to those based or doing business there.

Germany is well known for its business efficiency and manufacturing excellence and so Procurri sees the country as a natural fit to complement its purpose: offering unbeatable and all-encompassing service excellence to make their customers work easier and give them an advantage that their competitors can’t even hope to meet.

Interxion

Interxion is a colocation data centre provider operating in 50 facilities across Europe and beyond. The company has also been a long-standing member of the DCA. In November, Tech London Advocates (TLA) and Interxion launched a dedicated Working Group of investors, leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers and mobile operators to address challenges of, and campaigning for, the opportunities of 5G technology in Britain. This community of ecosystem stakeholders is independent of the government and led by the private sector to help in delivering the potential of full 5G roll-out to consumers, businesses and the wider society. 5G technology promises radically faster download speeds, increased network reliability and will enable advanced technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IOT) and driverless cars.

Submer Immersion Cooling

Submer Immersion Cooling designs, builds and installs Liquid Immersion Cooling (LIC) solutions such for HPC, hyperscalers, data centres, Edge, AI, Deep Learning and Blockchain applications. During the last months of 2019, Submer has consolidated its presence in Middle East and in US territories with new immersion cooling units in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and California. The organisation has also hired a new CTO, Scott Noteboom, with decades of experience in the data centre industry: a real visionary who will help Submer pave the way toward a future of sustainable data centres. Submer took part at SC19, the most important event in the supercomputing industry, presenting its immersion cooling solution for HPC. The company also announced a strategic partnership with Colt Data Centres Services, London (UK).

At SC19, Submer launched the SubmerStrings, an exclusive, interactive initiative to help its audience check their knowledge around immersion cooling and related topics (such as what the PUE is, what the most important benefits of immersion cooling are, etc.)

EcoCooling

The EcoCooling-supported Boden Type DC project won ‘Non-profit Industry Initiative of the Year’ at the coveted DCD awards in London. The Boden Type DC project was selected as a finalist by an independent panel of data centre experts from hundreds of entries, submitted from across the world. Following the announcement of the finalists, there were months of deliberation until the winners were announced at the awards ceremony. On the night EcoCooling was presented the award in collaboration with H1 Systems, RISE and Boden Business Agency as part of a brilliant night of celebration. The DCA is delighted to have the continued support from the EcoCooling team which won this award.

Find out more here.

CNet Training

CNET has celebrated the graduation of its Master’s Degree learners. The Master’s Degree in Data Centre Leadership and Management was created out of the need to expand existing skills and knowledge of talented technical managers to business leadership. This aims to arm them with contemporary knowledge and the capability to manage business imperatives and have a bigger impact on the business itself to contribute to growth, innovation and insight. Program content is written by the CNet Training team in consultation with industry leaders from all over the world.

CNet also launched an apprenticeship within the network cable infrastructure sector across England and Wales. The company has fully planned and prepared the content of the CNCI Apprenticeship that provides the apprentice and employer with a full itinerary of activities to follow and implement. It introduces the concept of an ‘apprenticeship in a box’, designed to take care of the time-consuming planning often associated with apprenticeships and on-going professional development.

Find out more here.

Chatsworth Products

Chatsworth Products announced that its eConnect Electronic Access Control (EAC) was named ‘Data Centre ICT Security Product of the Year’ at the DCS Awards 2019. For the award, finalists were asked to demonstrate the tangible impact their product has on the market, its value to customers, as well as how it differentiates itself from other products currently available.

Find out more here.

coolDC / Asperitas / Rittal

Partners Asperitas, Rittal and coolDC were delighted to receive the prestigious ‘Energy Smart’ award at the Global DCD Awards dinner. The award recognises the world’s most energy-aware and innovative approaches to building sustainable digital infrastructure. Fellow finalists included Huawei, Digital Realty and Windcores.

Congratulations to all three of these organisations – all of whom are DCA Corporate Partners.

Find out more here.

Goonhilly Earth Station

Goonhilly Earth Station recently joined the DCA as a Corporate Member and announced that it has inked a partnership agreement with the Australian Space Agency to collaborate and create new opportunities in the space economy in Australia, the UK and beyond. The new statement of strategic intent and cooperation aims to help progress the Australian space sector and make the benefits of space more accessible for businesses, governments and institutions.

To find out more about the DCA and how to become part of the data centre community, or to find news items from 2019, visit dca-global.org

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