 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell coming to you today from PTC 2022. Joining me is Chris Jones, Director of Data Center Infrastructure and Operations and Antonio Dossaso, Director of Operations for Spencer Building Carrier Hotel. Thank you both so much for joining us here today. It's so great to be together in person at PTC. It's been a couple years since we were able to be at this event and it's great to have you here and have you here with some great news to share. So I think that you have some exciting things maybe you want to share about Spencer Building and you can tell our audience and tell the market. Sure, yeah first off it's very exciting to be here. Very happy that we're able to make it to this event. I know that Ted's event usually has a lot of people attending. This year it's been a bit of a job here, a pandemic and all but I'd like to see that there's still a lot of people here which is great and for us we just launched our landing page to announce Spencer Building Carrier Hotel to the market. Our intention is to bring state-of-the-art provider neutral carrier hotel and talk to your data center to the Vancouver market at the downtown core. We believe that this is something that's needed seeing that the growing market in Vancouver is just accelerating and I think it's great timing for the market. Tell us about the team behind Spencer Building. I know that there's an all-star cast bringing this to market. Can you tell us about that? Sure, yeah I think Players Real Team has a great team behind them and they're the ones supporting this initiative and we have Richard Louie and Irv Van Raren who are our executives and financial leaders here that are providing direction and vision for the company. We also are able to take advantage of Antonio Del Saso who has over 30 years of building operations experience and so it's a really great fit. Yeah and then for us we're lucky that we claimed Chris on the open market because he brings a welcome experience to us and he's that experience of building data centers and knows our building and knows how we work so it was great landing Chris and hopefully he can lead us the right way because we believe in him. Yeah so you've got the right people, the right team. Why now? Why this development? Why this opportunity? I think the Vancouver market is growing especially in the last few years. Significant growth in the market and there's not a lot of I would say not a lot of data is in the capacity and carry hotel capacity in Vancouver. There is some but compared to other markets not a lot but the market is really growing. We've seen hyperscalers move in, lots of different companies are coming to Vancouver because of the access to APAC and other regions as well as close access to Washington just for the self of us. So I think capacity there is is an issue and so I think you know combining the Harvard Center which is the western Canadian telecommunications hub primary carry hotel basically in Vancouver with a new data center talked to your data center state-of-the-art I think it's a great fit and it will add a significant value to the market. Yeah I think just after that you know we started at Harvard Center in the early 90s we had a connectivity hub into Harvard Center. On the last few years we've grown out of everything. There's no more power, there's no more connectivity feeds, there's no more cooling capacity so we believe that bring this new project in place at Harvard Center. Spence building carry hotel is just a great fit for the building itself. So tell us about the building itself. What will it involve? What will it offer? I mean so it's going to be developed in the Spencer building which is just right beside the Harvard Center building. It was built from the 20s is significantly structurally set sound so that's the first great part and so we're going to build there the great foundation. We're going to build a tier three data center with 10 megawatts of emergency power between two data halls so five megawatts into the data halls providing redundant power and cooling as you would see in the data center but also trying to offer kind of a green initiative the most efficient mechanical cooling side taking advantage of all the free cooling that the Vancouver environment offers. Trying to also bring the price point down for our customers because we know that price point is always a significant issue for a lot of the customers coming to Vancouver you know prices at Vancouver are fairly high and so we're going to do our best to try to try to bring that price down for our customers by developing some very efficient systems that will allow our cost to be lower. And so when do you expect to start construction? When will it be complete and what's the timeline look like for you? Yeah so I think 2022 is going to be a significant year for us. We started the design process we're into pre-construction for the most part right now so 2022 should bring a lot of permit activity construction activity and with our goal of you know kind of early to mid 2023 but the global pandemic going on right now it's a bit up in the air just depending on kind of how supply chains go and a few different things but that's our goal and we're going to do our best to try to meet that. Yeah everyone's just trying to keep things on track at this point right there's a lot of global hurdles but sounds like you're right on track so far right in terms of what you had planned. When do you think you'll start tours and bookings for the facility you know and do you have an ideal tenant that you'd like to bring through? I think for me it's you know six or 12 months out from when our services become available typically so I would say that you know I don't know about an ideal tenant but I mean we want to offer anywhere from a you know small media business mom and pop to banks to government hyperscalers and small businesses anybody who needs all that connectivity and top tier data center infrastructure in one space I mean we have over 20,000 connected fibers in our building it is the primary telecommunications hub of western Canada so if you need to be with someone you want to be a Spencer building carrier hotel because we've got everyone there and you can connect to anyone immediately. Yeah and maybe just to add to that you know we at that harbour center again on the existing building platform we have three meamy rooms we already have cooling capacity emergency power discussed before which which is taxed out right now but our connectivity is still alive and well and we're open to to tap into that market with Spencer building hotel and we have a big market in harbour center and I think with the growth here and the flexibility of the new space which is ideally because we're still in growth in the growth stages of it so we can adapt as we build out our both data center all that Chris is working on so yeah it's great. Right and sort of adjust to the needs of the market as as they come to fruition. It's good timing out to come see us because we're in that process and then it's great. Everyone we talked to had their complaint has been that the downtown core just doesn't have create data center capacity available and so we learned that this is going to be an opportunity where we can hopefully provide that capacity to the market and provide those people with the services that they need. Yeah it feels like the right time the right location all the everything's lining up the right proposition for western canada I think at this time. Where can people go to sort of follow the progress in terms of you know. Think call Chris. Yeah Spencerbuilding.com is always our current landing page which will soon be a full-on website so there's information there. We also have our LinkedIn page and our Twitter which you can keep up to date on and also sign up on our website for updates and kind of get on through a VIP list where they get information ahead of time kind of before it gets announced in the market. Yeah so it was a great opportunity for the audience too. Yeah fantastic well thank you both for joining us and like I said it was great to it's great to be here in person and see you both and really exciting to hear this news and everything that is in store for for Vancouver and for Spencerbuilding Perrier Hotel so thank you. Thank you Chris and Antonio. Yeah thank you I mean we're just really excited to let everyone know what we're doing and provide a viable option in the Vancouver market. Yeah fantastic thank you thank you both and thank you viewers for joining JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking.