Introduction: This transcript has been generated for reference and accessibility, with subtitles included on the video for easy navigation. It will not be 100% accurate but should be very close to the conversation.

Hello and welcome to ‘In Conversation With’. My name’s Martin Veitch, and today I’m joined by Stewart Laing. Stewart is the CEO and founder of Asanti Data Centres, a key colocation provider. Tell me a little bit about yourself and the company, if you would Stewart.

So, I’ve been an IT industry now for a long time, almost 40 years now, the industry was going through another major change. And that was the growth of what we now call hyperscale data centres. That’s Microsoft or Amason Web Services, etc, etc.

And the industry commentators were talking about how everything would go in that direction. I had seen many times over the years that new things come along and they take a place, but they never become the be-all and end-all. So I believe there’s an opportunity to grow and develop local data centre provider for that provision. So that’s really the reason why we started as Asanti Data Centres.

As an idea as a concept, it was born 15 years ago. It took almost 14 years. And we started to come officially the 23rd of November, 2022. And that was within an initial acquisition of five data centres. We now have a sixth data centre, in Livingston. So, at the moment we’ve got two in the South, in Reading and in Farnborough, we’ve got Manchester and Leeds, and Hamilton and now working in partnership with another provider. We now have a secure data centre provision in Livingston, which will be focused on the Scottish market.

Okay, let’s go right back to basics. Tell me a little bit about co-location and data centres. Why is this stuff so much in demand and what’s it really providing for your customers?

Co-location data centres, I realise, was part of what I call the data centre ecosystem. So, they will sit often fit between the hyperscaler data centre and the local company or organisations. So, it provides local organisations with the facility that’s nearby. They can access it, they can go on the want, they know where their applications are, what their servers are, data is. But it’s also got the advantage of the security, the compliance that aligns with making sure that we have resilience in the data centres, which for organisations to do that themselves is sometimes impossible and other times expensive and it requires a lot of resource. So they get the benefits of having a data centre – that has all security aspects and resilience but at the same time it’s local to them and it gives them that comfort.

A little bit like if I’m a customer of a bank and I have a retail branch on the high street near me, that kind of comfort factor, yeah?

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of applications where especially legacy applications, older applications, that ideally need to be close up to the user. We’re now seeing that developing now with new applications as AI develops, and we will discuss that at some stage, but the AI element will develop new applications that again will probably come closer to the user again. So not distributed as far as a hyperscale data centre which can be anywhere in the world effectively.

Yeah, it seems to me that one of the major trends of the last 20 or 30 years is for CIOs to be able to take that data out of house, not have to manage the data centre internally and concentrate more on value-added, creative, innovative IT. Do you see that as a trend yourself?

Absolutely, I actually spent a good number of years before Asanti started, working with organisations doing exactly that. Organisations realising that IT is not necessarily what they do. They sell a product, or manufacture a product or a service, but they’re not IT people. And to have your own IT skills internally can be expensive. Absolutely. It’s difficult to get. There is a growing challenge in resource actually and skill sets. I started in the IT industry, I was one of the young people. Now, I’m not, but what we’re seeing is that there hasn’t been a lot of new people coming into the industry over the last number of years, surprisingly. And that creates lots of challenges and issues as well.

Yeah, so the real appeal is I can focus on, stick to my knitting, as it were, focus on the business, focus on adding value with digital and technological capabilities and not have to worry about the chores and the admin, etc, etc.

Absolutely, and that is definitely a growing trend and a growing requirement, which is driving, from an Asanti perspective it’s great because it is driving the growth in that space.

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned having these local provisions, obviously people tuning into this, they’re going to be highly familiar with AWS and Microsoft and Google with these epic data centres. You’re really providing something on a much smaller scale.

Yes, we are. Our data centres are deliberately in the local market and they’re never going to be huge campuses. We would rather have multiple campuses and have one super large one for the exact reason that we want to have that distributed capability around the UK and that allows people to have access to data centre services, where they want it rather than us saying it has to be in the South of England or the North of Scotland. It can be wherever you want it to be within a reasonable distance.

So, what you’re doing is very distinct, isn’t it, from the Microsofts, the Googles, the AWSs of this world?

Yes, as a co-location data centre provider. I see this as part of what I refer to as the data centre ecosystem. So, at one end of the scale you have the AWSs, the Microsofts, etc at the other end you’ve got the end user and we sit somewhere in the middle. But we’re also conscious as a colocation provider what we’re providing, our expertise is in is operating the data centre itself with all the things that means like resilience and security, etc, etc. Where we have focused is in developing a partner channel. So, we work with a small number of managed servers providers, network providers, because what we see in industry now is a move towards some called hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud is a combination of all of the things we’ve done for the years, it will always be a mix of on-premise with the customer in a co-location data centre provider and also with hyperscale. Because the big move now is organisations are getting much smarter in terms of their requirements now. What we are actively encouraging organisations to do is take a real close look at what you actually need. Then decide what your IT strategy, data centre strategy is, what officers have called strategy. Because a cloud strategy can be a combination of all those.

So, we work very closely with partners who have got the expertise to actually deliver those services in addition to what we provide as a co-location provider. We want to focus on what we’re doing and do it extremely well, that’s our key focus. And let other organisations, the partners, then deliver what they’re very good at. So, making sure we deliver the expertise and to work back to what the customer is requiring and what they’re actually looking for. But that starts with an organisation being able to understand what they actually need as business and then matching the strategy to that.

Yeah, which sounds like common sense, but we had this funny phenomenon, didn’t we? About 10 or 15 years ago where companies said, oh, we’re cloud first, or CIOs said we’re cloud first, and really went for it. Took everything away from the data centre, tried to go direct to these hyperscale providers. And now it seems to me we’ve retrenched a little bit and it’s much more of that, I guess the fashionable term now is hybrid.

I suppose when you’ve been in the industry for as long as I have you see these things that are happen often, and I can go back many years and the same things happened. Where something new comes along and then you have a situation where the industry commentators will pick it up, the press will pick it up. And before you know it, you’ve got this hype almost that starts to happen. I was a Unix engineer many years ago, and I can remember the Unix being the answer to everybody’s reaction. Open system, yeah. Guess what? It had its place for a long, long time. And it’s the same with, exactly the same things that happened with the public cloud aspect of it. Because what people did was they tied cloud strategy to public cloud. Public cloud is only a part of cloud strategy. But you’re absolutely right, there was this huge rush to public cloud. Often advice was given by the public cloud provider. Does that make sense?

They would say that, wouldn’t they?

Yeah, absolutely. So that was often what happened. So, organisations would say that this was a big new thing. As I said earlier, because I’ve been around so long and I saw these things happen, that was why, as I said, look, the opportunity I believe came for us to create Asanti, to provide the services that would be required at some point.

And I suppose we’re now very much in that space now. And if you go in and do a search online, you’ll find numerous examples of organisations who are now starting to realise that actually public cloud wasn’t the answer to everything. It was the answer to some things, and it all was all be a huge part of the industry going forward. However, there’s a lot of those elements now where people are starting to realise that that probably wasn’t the best thing to do. We did a survey  last year.

We spoke to a hundred senior executives of large organisations in the UK, 98% of them. I was shocked by that stat if I’m being honest, but 98% said, if they were doing it again, they would do it differently.

You wouldn’t start from there.

They would start back. And they’re actually bringing stuff back from the cloud.

So they say, and this, I knew it was happening. I was genuinely surprised to see the scale of the response in terms of the number of organisations that were now saying actually, it wasn’t the right thing. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot going on out there, especially in the public sector.

Yeah.

Huge amount in the public sector who are saying “oh we’ve got a cloud first strategy” but they’re still tying that to public cloud, which hopefully we’ll see a change in that, because not just from an Asanti perspective, but from their perspective, they take the time to understand what they need.

Absolutely. Well, that trend, some people call it repatriation done, they are data repatriation, and they’re actually moving away from cloud where it makes sense at least. And it seems to me that this is good logical stuff, horses for courses, pragmatic approach.

Absolutely. So that is the new phrase that’s around. But you’re right, it does mean that, as I say, it really is summing up the fact that you have these organisations now understanding what’s best for us. Not what’s best for the provider, whether it’s a managed service provider, or a colo provider, or a Azure, whatever. It’s what’s best for the customer. And that’s really our focus.

I’ve tried to build a business, I am trying to build a business based on that principle. It’s something going back over many years but I was always focused on building customer excellence into what we did, and what we do, and that’s exactly where we want to take Asanti. Partly also the reason why we don’t have all the skill sets, let’s deliver excellence in what we do, and then work with the partners to provide the customer what they actually need, rather than what they’re told they need.

Absolutely. Now, Stewart, I mean, you mentioned the fashion for public cloud and further back, Unix. The current big mania, of course, is artificial intelligence. Where does AI sit in terms of colocation, cloud, data centres?

That’s a massive question. To a certain extent, I’m still asking it as well.  I spent the last 18 months focused quite a bit actually, in trying to understand more about the industry, more about what it actually means for the data centre industry.

But AI also has different factors to it. So, you have the, and I’m not an expert in any means but you have the learning module, so the bit where you see the industry nowadays what they call the GPUs. They’re super powerful computers. Those are the devices that they use to take all the data and process and create these amazing technologies. And it is going to be amazing to see where it goes and what it does. But that takes a huge amount of power.

So, an average data centre rack, if you build a data centre, which most of them in the UK are, you build a data centre 20 years ago or 15 years ago, you build a data Centre for 4 kilowatts. So that’s a couple of kettles. AI technologies, these are 100 kilowatts. 50 kettles in the same space. So how do you power that? How do you cool that? And that’s creating lots of challenges for the industry right now. But also the cost of power in the UK is very expensive. So last year we saw three opportunities that we were directly involved in bidding for. And all of it went abroad, it didn’t stay in the UK. That just came down to the cost of actual power because you’re using so much of it, because you can use a lot of power in a very small space when it starts with AI. However, there’s another aspect of AI, which is what comes out the other end of that whole process – is applications. Applications don’t need that, not necessarily, they don’t necessarily need that amount of power or that amount of computing power.

So therefore, does that mean, and I’m still asking these questions, does that mean we come back to normal server storage technologies that exist? I wouldn’t name many manufacturers, but we all know who they are, or the main ones. So, does that mean we come back to that again for the applications? And where do those applications go? Well, what I am being told, what I am learning is that those applications will go closer to the user in a lot of cases.

It’s going to be incredible just to see, fascinating to see where all this goes, but there’s all sorts of questions unanswered. There’s all the challenges for the data centre industry, especially in the UK, because realistically, if you’re going to have 100 kilowatt racks plus going forward, you’re going to have to build something very specific for it. You can’t do that in existing, what I would class as a traditional data centre. Any data centres in the UK. So, they would have to do something new to accommodate that. And that can be a challenge in a lot of data centres. And if you’ve got a data centre that’s up and running and it’s full, the last thing you want to be doing is starting to mess around with your power or your systems. You have to make sure that that’s the end, it’s resilient and there’s nobody impacting customers. You have to be able to do that off to one side where you’re not going to impact that?

And we’re looking at that in a couple of data centres, not on a huge scale for AI, but we are looking at it in terms of how could we do that or even do we right now? Because if the cost of power stays where it is, the chances are that where people looking to use a lot of power unless they have to be in the UK, they’re potentially going to go somewhere else.

Absolutely, and that raises a lot of other questions as well, more questions than answers like the old song, isn’t it? In the sense that they’re going to be subject to different legislation about data protection and so on about data sovereignty. These are all big challenges.

There’s a lot going on in that space as well, and you may have saw it in the press, but data centres and the new existing UK government, have now been classified as critical national infrastructure (CNI). We again don’t know what that means yet. I’ve been to two of the sessions so far, it’s very, very early days. I do believe it will be advantageous for the industry going forward. Our industry, it’s not really regulated as such, it’s self-regulated. I think there will be an element of that coming, that’s what I’m expecting. But it also raises the awareness and the status of data centres around the UK as well.

But we are certainly seeing, we don’t know what the changes have been yet, but there’s meetings every three months now run by the government which I now attend, along with probably every other data centre company in the UK because we want to see where that’s going to go. It’s already in Europe, so there’s new legislation that’s coming out in Europe. So, I suppose in some ways we’re just still waiting to see where that really is for data centres.

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, the way I see it is that in the same way that CIOs go to a data centre colocation provider for help with the nuts and bolts and the day-to-day operations of managing IT, data centre services, now they’re going to have to also be looking to the data centre partners for help with compliance, with sustainability, and all of these highly complicated and often changing landscapes.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that was interesting is that this, the new CNI, and compliance is there that comes with that, they actually go beyond the likes of ourselves, it could go as far as organisations with in-house data centres. It depends on the scale of them. Again, they haven’t come up with an initial definition at the moment of what that is. It’s not huge in terms of it is related to power usage. So, there will be some organisations who potentially will end up as part of this, and they’ll also have to look at the various information we’re going to have to feedback as part of being part of the critical national infrastructure.

Stewart, why did you create Asanti? Was there something going on in the business that you felt left a space for you?

Yeah, I just believe that we were never going to be just hyperscale, and then therefore, what did that actually mean? And that combined with something we talked about earlier on, that CEOs, COOs, wanting to know where things were and that comfort element. So, it was really a combination of where we saw the industry going, but also what I’d experienced over many years, just working closely with those type of organisations and those types of people and knowing how they think and what they really wanted.

You had a gripe with them, overselling or?

Well, it was interesting because having spent almost most of my life in the IT industry as a service provider, I actually crossed over the fence as I would call it and I was working in organisations. So, I was actually seeing the industry from the outside. And to be totally honest, I was not overly impressed at times with what I saw. I worked with one organisation, we did a questionnaire. We sent the questionnaire out for a potential service. And I was a person getting responses and having been in the industry for so long, I was watching some of these responses and thinking ‘really’? So, I think for me, one of our hugely important things is openness. And I’m not saying people are dishonest, that have been wrong to say that, but that accuracy and openness and having the ability to engage with customers on that basis. We basically, what’s the old advert – it does what it says on the tin. Exactly that. That we are not in any way misleading anyone, that we are upfront with what we do. Let’s just state what it is, so people are clear at the end of the day. And that’s what I want to do, I just want to bring it to the industry and I’m not saying we’re the only people doing it, we’re not – but it was just something that I saw first-hand and disappointed I suppose.

Tell me about the future, what’s going to happen next for Asanti and for the broader business?

I just think it’s a really exciting time in the industry. There’s a lot of unknowns. AI is fascinating. And where that takes us only time will tell. As Asanti, our ambition and our goal, our plan is to grow through further acquisitions but also new builds, potentially. As we see the growth and the expansion of local data centres, there’s a lot of areas in the UK where there isn’t any. So, we’ll look at that very closely in terms of the new geographical spread. Ideally, we try and pair our data centres up so Reading and Farnborough we see is a pair of data centres. Manchester and Leeds. And that’s part of doing the service, you can then provide so you can give customers that resilience within the data centre, but a additional resilience by DR and backup, etc, etc.

So, we’re looking at that very closely. But yeah, we see the exciting future, we see further acquisitions, as I said and that’s something we’re constantly looking at.

You’re going to want to put the flags on the map all over the UK, is that right?

Yes, and there is a map actually. So, we know where the gaps are already. As I said, we’re south of London, we’re in the north of England, Scotland, the Midlands is still an area where we don’t have anything at this point in time. So yeah, I think it’s a really exciting future. And I do think the whole AI aspect is certainly going to play a huge part in that. The growth of data is also a massive aspect to this. Right. Because that’s, it doesn’t really talk to that much, but three or four years ago I was at Data Centre Dynamics. we’re all online, it was during COVID times. There’s this incredible presentation, I found it incredible. Because actually what they presented was this, I mentioned the other one about the one extreme, you’ve got the hyperscale data centre providers, the other end you had what you call your local organisations and they’re the box in the middle on the screen. And I was sending messages to some of the team to say, somebody’s about to put Asanti’s data centre strategy on the screen! And he did, he said in the middle here, are your local data centre providers, not just Asanti. And that was actually driven by the growth of data and the impact that was having on internet traffic. So internet works at the speed of light.  And that’s as fast as we can go, we can’t go any faster. So there is a limitation, and I’m not network specialist by any means but listening to these guys was very, very interesting.

And they were saying in the long term, actually we couldn’t sustain the growth of data. So the way you do that is you take it local. Yeah. So you start driving more stuff local than you can, and only the stuff that you need to then goes out in terms of the big wide world as I would basically call it. So we’re definitely going to see a huge, I believe, a huge increase, and therefore really exciting times for Asanti.

Well, it’s phenomenal, isn’t it? I mean, there’s that mind boggling statistic that the amount of data being created every two years exceeds the whole history, the whole accretion of data in all of history. And you do feel that don’t you with AI, that that could even accelerate further. And that’s going to be very tough for CIOs to manage and for organisations to behave in a responsible manner and govern the data, hence the appeal of third parties like Asanti.

Absolutely. As I say, I think having been in the industry for over 30 years, it’s actually incredible when you think back, even over the small number of years, and how things of change. I was a Unix technical guy, within two years of actually stopping doing that all of my skillsets were obsolete. That just shows you how fast the industry moves and how, I can’t keep up with that, that’s for sure. There are obviously people who can, but yeah, just the growth is phenomenal. And I can’t comprehend the fact, that I remember reading that article, in all the years previously, we’ve created more than the last two years of it ever had in history. Absolutely. The a phenomenal statistic and almost impossible to comprehend, but I absolutely agree, it’s going to continue.

Well, Stewart, that’s about all we’ve got time for. I know we could sit here and yabber on for a lot longer. There’s so much going on in this business, but that’s all we’ve got time for today in a conversation with. And we look forward to seeing you next time for our next podcast. Thanks so much.