Global Switch strengthens senior management

Scott Harrod has been appointed as Group Projects Director with effect from 23 September 2013. As head of the Projects group he will be responsible for the management of the Development, Construction and Engineering teams. He will also lead the execution of the further phases of Global Switch’s major development programme across Europe and Asia-Pacific announced previously, which when completed will see a substantial increase in the size of the Global Switch data centre portfolio over the medium term.

Scott has over 30 years’ experience working on major development and construction projects in many parts of the world, the last 15 of which have been exclusively mission-critical facilities. Most recently, Scott was General Manager Project Solutions Asia for Emerson Network Power and before that he was Head of Construction Asia Pacific for a major international data centre provider. Prior to this Scott was co-founder and owner of Global DC, a specialised development/construction management business that conceptualised, business-planned and delivered data centre projects for major corporates and international telecommunications and IT companies across Asia Pacific. Before that, Scott was also the founder, owner and Managing Director of Harrod Hughes, a company focused on the design and construction of commercial real estate buildings.

Having secured pre-commitments from a number of large multi-national companies, Global Switch is currently constructing Stage 1 of a planned expansion to its Amsterdam data centre and Stage 1 of Sydney East, its second data centre in Sydney. The next investments in the expansion programme will be new data centres in Singapore, where Global Switch is planning a second facility, and Hong Kong, followed by Frankfurt and London. The new developments, most of which are on existing campuses and on land already owned by Global Switch, have secured substantial diverse power as well as masterplan, outline or full planning consent. Customers will be able to benefit from the considerable carrier presence already available on its campuses.

John Corcoran, Global Switch's Executive Chairman commented: "I am delighted to welcome someone of Scott’s calibre and experience to our senior management team.”

“With data centre demand for scale deployments in highly resilient, central, low latency and network dense locations increasing in many of the Tier 1 locations where we are present, it is important to ensure that these large scale projects are delivered on time and within budget to meet customer requirements. Scott’s appointment will therefore be a key element in the achievement of this objective during this important phase of the company’s growth.”