Our sincere thanks to John Hall, Sales and Marketing Director at Infinity SDC for taking the time to respond to our questions sent via email.
This is the second interview in this series where we look at some of the companies offering retail colocation solutions for the first time. Obviously calling Infinity a “new entrant” is a bit odd, given they’ve been running their Romford data centre for many years now, but in terms of a new entrant into the the retail colocation market they definitely count as one of the many new options in the market. To emphasise this point Infinity’s new Slough data centre, which opened at the end of 2013, is already offering a high quality facility at a significantly different price point to other colocation options on the Slough Trading Estate – surely great news for buyers. If you are interested to know about colocation options from new entrants such as Infinity, Everest (the other company we “interviewed” in this series) or others across the UK please get in touch. Meantime, over to John:
John, one of the themes Colo-X has stressed over the past few years has been the increasing range of options for retail colocation buyers, both in terms of operators and locations or facilities. Could you give a bit more detail as to the thinking behind this?
“I believe there is less distinction between the terms ‘wholesale’ and ‘retail’ and in reality it is just a matter of scale. Infinity came to market as a large bespoke provider, serving the enterprise and channel partner markets. Over the past few years the trend has been for customers in both of these markets to purchase in smaller units and to look for greater economies through shared infrastructure. As a result, fewer customers have been looking for a fully bespoke and dedicated solution.
“We responded to changes in demand by offering power, space and platform flexibility through scalable solutions such as the ‘Infinite Data Centre’. We offer colocation services at rack, pod or data hall level.
“Due to the growing need for data centre capacity in the Thames Valley area, home to many of Europe’s leading IT and computing companies, we have opened the data centre in Slough.”
How is Infinity adapting to cope with lots of small scale customers compared to just a handful of large scale clients in its former wholesale only model?
“It has been a natural progression for Infinity to take its core skills and values that have developed over the years in the wholesale market and apply them to the retail market.
“We have been engaged in an ongoing programme of business transformation to develop the skills, processes and systems required to support these changes. This has been achieved with the customer at the forefront of our thinking. We see no end to this and expect more changes to come and the need to be agile and responsive to all change.”
What will Infinity be adding to the retail colocation market?
“The role of the enterprise data centre of the future is a launch pad for public cloud services and a dynamic platform for the retained IT assets. The retained IT will host business-critical applications and provide the augmentation and orchestration of the Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). The size of enterprise data centres will vary depending on the role of IT within the company. It needs to be agile, as companies dynamically alter the balance of retained and outsourced IT services.
“We are developing further support for the enterprise to migrate services to the cloud, supporting them on their IT journey, de-risking investments and providing commercial terms that make future costs transparent. Improved connectivity and products such as the ‘Infinite Data Centre’ are key strands of that strategy. Our combination of technical and commercial flexibility ensures that what it offers is workload focused and value driven.”
Can you update us with news and progression on Romford, Slough, Here East and Stockley Park?
“We have recently signed another key financial services customer at our popular site in Romford which is becoming close to capacity. We are also continuing to attract customers to our newest flag ship data centre in Slough. We recently announced a five year frame work agreement with Janet, the UK’s national research and education network, provided by Jisc. We are creating a data centre to support the requirements of academic research and will be the first shared data centre for medical and academic research in the UK.
“Janet is the first major customer to fully embrace the new flexible approach offered via the ‘Infinite Data Centre’. The design will combine a dynamic range of platforms such as traditional Tier III, low resiliency and high density infrastructure platforms. This is also the first large scale example of high performance computer environments being placed in an outsourced co-location facility. We fully anticipate the data centre will make Infinity Slough a globally important community of interest and a blueprint for offering collocated High Performance Computing (HPC) services.
“In regards to Here East / Stratford, plans are still being worked on prior to the development of the site at Here East.
“We are expecting to announce a major deal in the near future but at present, the data centre in Stockley Park is 50 per cent occupied, with 5MW IT load capacity available.”
How has Infinity found the market in 2014? What has demand been like? Have there been any particular themes to this? How has Infinity found the pricing environment?
“There has been a marked up-turn in demand which is in line with the trends for scalable deals with the highest level of interest from channel partners. This could be attributed to the increased take-up of cloud services and a rise in demand for cloud hosting.”
What are Infinity’s thoughts and expectation for 2015?
“At Infinity we believe the economic climate and the positive macro trend for data growth fuelled by the digital revolution will stimulate further demand going into 2015. Examples of this trend are Big Data, Internet of Things and wearable technologies which are all set to accelerate next year and drive organisations to rethink how they use IT and the infrastructure that supports it.
“According to Gartner, 73 per cent of organisations will be looking to invest in big data in the next two years. As companies initiate projects to leverage the benefits of analysing big data, they will need to look at what storage and computing power is required to crunch data quickly and in a meaningful way. The launch of the Apple Watch in 2015 will spur more interest in wearable technology and competitors will drop their pricing to make it even more accessible to the masses. This leads to increased use of applications and data gathering which needs to be stored and processed in data centres.
“The current economic situation in Europe is a concern, but failing major economic set backs, we predict 2015 to be a strong year for outsource data centre services demand in London and believes the data centre market will be an exciting place to be in 2015 and beyond.”
John, thanks again for your help with this interview.