Seismic shift in the market

Q Can you provide some brief background on the company

to date?

A Infinity started out in 2006 with a mission to create the most secure and reliable data centres in the market. Our first customers were wholesale clients who required highly tailored solutions. We now also provide retail colocation services and apply the same quality and expertise to all our clients no matter what size the solution.
We have five data centres to the east and west of London and have had a successful financial year, increasing revenue by 29%, from £16.7 million to £21.7million. Our customers include some of the UK’s leading banks, universities, research institutes, cloud vendors, global insurers and telecommunications companies.
Q Who are the key personnel involved?

A I am responsible for leading the team, setting the direction of the company and ensuring our products and services best serve our clients’ needs. I have spent my career in technology including CTO roles as a user of data centre services. This helps us better understand the challenges our customers face, such as the constant and relentless progression of technological change.
We have an experienced management team who bring different skills to the business. The CFO, John Thompson runs the finance, commercial and legal functions including keeping us supplied with ample capital to fund the customer fuelled growth of our data centres. John spent 14 years at Deloitte, working mainly in corporate finance with high growth companies and has also been the CFO for other private equity backed businesses.
John Hall, who is sales and marketing director joined Infinity to drive the customer engagement transformation from being a wholesaler to where we are today with a full multi-site retail colocation offering. John previously worked for Phoenix IT where he spent 10 years as group sales and marketing director.
Q What have been the key milestones?

A Earlier this year, the London Stock Exchange identified Infinity as being one of 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain in its annual list of some of the fastest-growing UK companies, including many household names such as Zoopla and Cath Kidston.
We have also been recognised twice in the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100, moving up to 22nd place in the latest league table.
Winning the bid to develop the former Olympic Broadcast and Press Centre at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as part of the Here East venture was a tremendous achievement and we are very excited to be launching our latest data centre at Here East in early 2016. This will be one of the largest and most efficient data centres in Europe.
Last year we also won the contract to create a shared data centre for Universities and Research Institutes as part of the Janet framework. This was very soon after we launched our Infinite Data Centre proposition and a great endorsement for Infinity’s innovative approach to data centre solutions. The shared data centre infrastructure we provide is helping UK research become a global leader, which we are very proud of.
Q Infinity states they are the ‘London data centre experts’ – is
this your main USP?

A London is becoming the digital capital of Europe as tech giants such as Google and Facebook set the pace by locating their European HQs here. This is attracting other businesses and talented people looking for jobs at these companies, giving Infinity a great home market to operate in and deep local knowledge as the London Data Centre experts. Our sites are balanced across London with close proximity to the financial markets, networks, internet peering points and transport links.
Q What else distinguishes the company in such a crowded
market?

By applying our experience of designing, building and operating data centres for some of the industry’s most discerning users to all our customers, we’ve been able to tailor services to suit, something that has caused many of our customers to grow with us. This was part of the inspiration behind the launch of our Infinite Data Centre proposition, to offer customers flexible data centre solutions. In addition, our deep understanding of our local market and our ability to apply our wholesale market experience to the retail market helps to distinguish us in the marketplace.
Q Can you foresee a time when you will look outside of London
and/or the UK to grow the business?

A Although data centres often provide virtual services, the physical assets are anchored geographically and are tailored to suit the local market. This is why it is so important to have local market knowledge to be successful in the data centre business. We are very much London data centre experts so for the time being at least, we intend to be 100 per cent focussed on the London market.
Q How many data centres do you have right now, and what is
their status (i.e. full, plenty of capacity etc.)?

A Our portfolio includes five data centres across four locations in London, providing 70MW of customer IT power delivered into more than half a million square feet of technical space. Infinity has built and contracted to customers around a quarter of the portfolio to date, so we have ample room for even the largest of customers to grow with us. Infinity launched its first data centre in Romford in 2008 which was also Europe’s first centre to be accredited with the UpTime Institute Tier IV Design Certification. Four years later, Stockley Park opened with a major telco customer as the anchor tenant.
The Slough data centre was launched in January 2014, our first modular design that employs scalable building blocks. It is the first time Infinity has deployed pre-built facilities for immediate customer occupation and the facility can accommodate a range of requirements from individual racks to fully dedicated data halls. In 2014, Infinity won the Janet framework agreement to create the UK’s first shared data centre for research and education at Infinity Slough. Since winning the contract Infinity has seen significant take-up from universities and research education. We have just completed our phase two build out at Slough to to accommodate the demand for this and other clients.

We are developing our latest data centre at Here East which is on the site of the former London 2012 Olympic Press and Broadcast centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The data centre will be the largest, greenest and most efficient in our portfolio and represents a one off opportunity for customers to co-locate their people and technology at the heart of an exciting digital hub.
Q Can you tell us a little bit about Infinity’s various customer
offerings, starting with installation?

A We offer a range of services to help customers get up and running as quickly as possible including migration services to help customers move in together with rack and equipment installation.
Q And your remote hands offering?

A Infinity Remote Hands is a 24/7 first line maintenance (FLM) service, providing remote hands facilities to our colocation customers. The service is managed via our Network Operations Centre (NOC) that is open 24 hours, 365 days a year and is supported via Infinity’s highly trained technicians. On call-out our FLM technicians are despatched in two hours with associated service guarantees.
Q And your cross-connects?

A We supply cross-connects between ODFs and customer in-rack patch panels and our service comprises of installation scheduling, supply, installation, test and handover, capacity management and break-fix.
Q And your connectivity?

A Providing customers with access to one of the richest connectivity environments in the UK is a key part of our strategy. Infinity has strived to secure the right connectivity partners - organisations that have invested heavily in pre-deploying high bandwidth infrastructure. This offers customers the best connectivity, scalable, high bandwidth connections that provide the reach, diversity and capacity they need. We are a LINX vPoP which offers customers the ability to connect with the additional 520 LINX members across

more than 60 countries and exchange low cost internet traffic in an effective, economical way without requiring the equipment at the main LINX PoP.
Q And your telco services?

A Our range of telco services are all backed up by our customer service management. These services include Tier 1 internet connectivity, Ethernet, wavelength services and dark fibre.
Q What about the wholesale services Infinity offers?

A Our longstanding experience as a wholesaler means we are as comfortable designing, building and operating an entire bespoke data centre for a client as we are providing dedicated data halls or suites to enterprises looking to outsource their data centre management or to integrators, managed service providers and resellers looking for quality infrastructure as a platform to provide cloud, managed IT and hosting services to end-users.
Our data centres are designed to Tier III+ specifications and support 4kW, 10kW, 20kW, 30kW standard rack power densities and also support High Density platforms providing up to 40kW per rack for customers deploying High Performance Computing.
Q And the Co-lo and Infinite services?

A Our colocation solutions are designed to be agile and flexible in terms of power, space and platform densities. We work with our customers to understand their overall IT needs, so that we can offer them the right colocation solution. Designed specifically to support IT transformations, the Infinite Data Centre makes the data centre a part of the IT solution, not just the building where the IT resides.
Q And we can’t ignore security?

A We take security extremely seriously and train our security team to the highest level. When we first came into existence we cut our teeth on clients with very demanding security needs. This means from the start we have always built our security to the highest possible level, allowing us to meet any demand placed on us.
We manage all aspects of security from the ground up and are able to take full control of every element of the physical security within our data centres. This gives us the capability to design the security to specifically suit the needs of our data centres and customers.
Q Nor, finally, energy efficiency?

A Energy efficiency is of the utmost importance to us, not just because we want to be an environmentally responsible company, but because this enables our customers to make significant cost savings. Our team are constantly looking for new ways to drive energy efficiency.
Our data centre at Here East will be the most energy efficient of all our data centres with a PUE of below 1.25. The site will use a combination of hybrid adiabatic cooling, centralised district cooling making the most of the Olympic legacy features of this unique site and high efficiency free cooling chillers. The design allows the most efficient medium at the particular time to support the data centre cooling load whist still offering a fully resilient cooling infrastructure that remains concurrently maintainable irrespective of which cooling solution is the current deployed solution. The design will flex to accommodate changes in ambient, load and site utilisation seamlessly.
Q Contract flexibility (increased) seems to be a major issue right
now. What’s Infinity’s take on this?
A We believe that true flexibility shouldn’t just be about what gets written into a contract. It starts with understanding what customers need to support their IT and then creating a flexible data centre solution that meets those IT needs now and in the future. This is key to the future of the industry and why we designed our Infinite Data Centre service. It provides the flexibility and agility to scale space and power requirements in line with IT.
Q How does the Cloud revolution impact on Infinity as a
business?

A Cloud is relevant to all companies as they move along their IT journey, whether they decide to use public cloud, create their own private cloud or a combination of both using a hybrid cloud. All cloud solutions utilise data centre capability so the impact is more about how colocation data centres are designed and operated to anticipate and facilitate rather than frustrate the cloud journey for customers. We provide a flexible environment technically, operationally and commercially, allowing enterprises to balance how and where their IT workloads are deployed using our Infinite Data Centre proposition.
Q For example, are you under pressure to/do you already offer
some managed services?

A We are focussed on being the best at what we do, and because many of our customers are managed service providers in their own rights, we encourage them to provide their services to other Infinity customers across our sites.
Q What about the Software-Defined Era – is this having an impact
on your business?

A Businesses are always looking for ways to remain competitive and technology can be a great enabler to streamline process, improve the customer experience and increase profits. The software defined era is helping companies to do this as more orchestration and automation of processes allows workloads to be efficiently allocated and managed.

Everything we do for our customers is about helping them understand and deliver the best economic use of space, power, cooling and resilience to meet their business needs, all in a secure environment. Our Infinite Data Centre proposition anticipates and allows for flexibility in all these areas and recognises that as IT technology matures and is increasingly applied to business in more sophisticated ways, the balance between space, power, cooling and resilience will keep changing.
As software defined “everything” evolves, our job is to ensure the operating elements of the data centre are integrated with software control to allow more real-time and ultimately automated control of the assets in response to workload demand and our customers’ commercial imperatives. We expect that as software defined everything matures our Infinite proposition will be delivered using software defined techniques.
Q And we can’t ignore the Internet of Things?

A Industry analysts estimate the number of connected devices could be anywhere from 20 billion to 100 billion by 2020. The data being gathered by these devices drives the need to invest in big data. 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. This leads to increased use of applications and data gathering which needs to be stored and processed in data centres.
This represents a new demand for data centres that we are right at the start of and just as the use of mobile devices and video content have shaped the current generation of data centres; the Internet of Things will shape the next. We are already in discussion with customers about how best to meet what will be a huge demand for more data centre capacity.
Q The 451 Group has predicted a ‘seismic shift’ in the colo space
– how do you see this playing out in terms of the numbers of
players remaining and the types of services they offer?

A Our sector has been shaped largely by carrier hotels, the financial services sector and the internet. The desire to cash in on the growth and success of data centres has drawn a lot of property speculation and generic growth capital into the sector which has often not taken the time to understand its customers, or the underlying technology trends. The data centre companies that survive and prosper longer term will be the ones that stay close to their customers to understand and spot opportunity, build flexibility into their capability so they can respond to demand and have economies of scale at every level of their business.
For me, this means fewer, larger companies operating less, larger sites. Scale, efficiency, flexibility, interconnectivity and market responsiveness are the watchwords. Seismic shift – you bet.