 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jean-Marc Sliman, joining me today is Andy Davies, the director of Data X Connects, as well as host of the Insight Data Center podcast. Andy, welcome to JSA. I hope you've been keeping well over the last 18, 24 months with everything that's going on in the world. As we turn the page on 2021 and walking to 2022, hopefully a bit more hopeful of what's in the store for the future, if we look into data centers, what are the major trends that you see for our market? Good afternoon, thanks for having me on first. I think from a trends perspective, a lot of people will talk about the usual trends that you're hearing and what a lot of my guests talk about on the podcast. ESG, as we briefly mentioned before we come online, the fact there's gonna be more hyperscale projects I think in 2022, because a lot were delayed in 2021, challenges around power, new regions coming into the market. There's a lot of standard topics, but personally I'll switch it towards the recruitment side because obviously that's what I do day in, day out. I think a lot more investment into learning development and training is what we'll see in 2022. A lot of the operators and the companies that we work with are now starting to say that that is one of their key priorities going forward to ensure they can create the workforce to sustain the growth. And if we, I mean, those are really good trends and things we can only change for better once we start paying attention to those things. But what will be the biggest challenges? Because this also brings a lot of challenges, including on the talent side of things and how things are done, probably also need to change a little bit. So what do you foresee as challenges for operators for next year? Again, most of the discussions I have are obviously around talent. So around how can we attract people? How can we recruit people? How can we retain people? There's a big piece around the talent and the industry at the moment. There's obviously a huge skill shortage across the world as well. Within Europe, it is a major challenge at the moment. And there's a number of different facets around why. You've got the issue of new entry level people coming into the sector. We need to attract more at that level. Where do we find them? How can we get them into the industry? You've got trying to attract from other sectors. So what can we do as a sector to bring more people into the data center sector? And then retention is a huge piece. There's not enough of us in the industry as it is. So what we don't wanna be doing is losing people to other sectors. So it's a big challenge for the data center sector to ensure that it's the sector of choice within engineering, IT and construction. And that we are actually investing and really working with a strategy to attract and retain people in the data center industry. Okay, I mean, if there was one thing that you look, if you look at operators today, if there's one thing that I've been completely wrong and if you could change tomorrow, you would change it based on what you just said, what would it be to make this a better place for people to stay and retain talent in the industry? From a retention point of view, a lot of the conversations we would have with engineers or people working for operators is a stress. It's a very stressful job. They're operating in a critical role, 24-7 shifts, et cetera. They really need to be on point all the time. So if a candidate is coming towards potentially to look for a new opportunity, a lot of the time it is because they just feel that there's too much pressure on them. So I think having those conversations with your employees around work-life balance, are they happy in their role? Can they conduct their role to a high level of the stress of the position? And just remembering that they are people that have a life outside of work and ensuring that as a company, whether you're an operator or another organisation, you are putting a real focus on ensuring that, your company's a nice place to work, you're looking after your staff and you're checking in with them. Don't forget to have those conversations with your employees. Went to health being very important, especially in the days they were living, even more important as a lot of people work from home. But let's talk about your business. So DataXConnect, tell us a little bit about the business and what is the roadmap for 2022? Yeah, no problem. DataXConnect, we're a data centre talent provider, recruitment company. The brand was established around 18 months ago. We created the brand during COVID, like you do. I think sometimes you need a challenge to actually kind of realise that you need to change things. So we use that time wisely. But we've been doing data centre recruitment for around five years. We were just doing it under a different banner. What I guess what our goal is or my goal is, I want to create a global leader in data centre recruitment with a huge focus on customer service. And I want our clients and our candidates to work with us because we give an excellent service. And that's really what our core focus is and what we're built around. As regards to what we do, we operate globally. We recruit across the world now. The majority of our business at the moment is in Europe. We also recruit in the US and Asia. And we recruit with all levels of the data centre spectrum from the owner operators, the acquisition companies all the way down to your contractors and your consultants building the facility. So I guess we've got quite a good view of the market. We are in all regions. We can see what's happening. And we try and position ourselves as that company that can try and work with the client to solve their talent problem, whether that's retention, attraction, looking for more diverse candidates, whatever it may be. I was going to ask, in terms of the jobs that you've got an offer, are you recruiting for? Have you seen a shift over the last, let's say 18 months, even just since you started based on your previous experience as well? Have you seen a shift on what people are looking for in terms like, are they looking more for real estate people, for acquisition people? Is it engineering jobs that's really on demand? How do you demand now? What kind of shit have you seen in terms of specific roles? Someone asked me this question earlier in the week. So I think the main challenge for a majority of operators at the moment is engineers. And this is largely just because of the sheer number, the increasing number of data centers. So if you looked at the London region as an example, they're pushing up to a gigawatt of data centers now. And obviously that increases the amount of engineers needed. But those engineers are not there because the data center engineers in that region are already employed in other data centers. So what you're finding is that the operators are having to look a bit outside of the box to try and attract those engineers. And where can we get them from? What attributes are we looking for? Rather than specifically saying, I need someone with five years data center experience. So we've seen that as a lot. And obviously sales opportunities have been quite big this year. Again, as capacity increases, the operators obviously need to fill that space. So they're looking for more sales staff. But generally it is everything and in the majority of locations at the moment. Okay, just a quick side question, because you mentioned for London and coming up to one gigabyte in the sorts of engineers. Have you seen Brexit having any impacts on talent shortage already? Not at all, to be honest. The only impact we've seen from Brexit is more around the travel restrictions. So for the contractors building the facilities, there was a large talent pool in the UK, which was flying in and out of Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, wherever the facility was. And obviously that is now more difficult because they have to secure a visa. So you saw a bit of a delay with regards to that situation and solving that problem. But from a capacity or development perspective, the UK market is busier now than it's ever been. I think that could be a positive impact to Brexit, to be honest, because there is obviously a lot of organizations looking to bring their data into the UK rather than holding it in the EU. But within Europe, again, we've not really seen a slowdown in development in any countries. We've probably seen an increase in development outside of the usual flat D markets, pushing into the new territories and new regions. Okay, Andy, tell me about the insight that is in the podcast. When did it started? Why did you start it? Gives you a bit of juice from behind the scenes. So again, the insight that is in the podcast started around July 2020. I think I have to look at my date to realize what year it has been such a crazy 18 months. So the reason why I started it was I listened to a lot of podcasts. I enjoyed podcasts. And I just got frustrated with the industry not sharing stories. There were so many great people in the sector, so many great things happening, but everybody was hidden behind this. You have to sign an NDA. We're not allowed to talk about it. Curtin, so I wanted to give people the opportunity, a platform to talk about their career and how they've developed in the industry with the hope that that would attract more people into the sector, because they then understand that you don't have to be an engineer. There are opportunities in sales, marketing. There's some really clever people in the sector. There's opportunities across the globe. So there was a number of things, but the main reason was let's talk about it. Let's share some stories and get the exposure of the sector up from something that we all did, but nobody was allowed to talk about it if anyone except the people within the magic circle. I think you've done about 60 episodes so far. So what's been the... What is the highlight? What's the main one? What's the one that really stuck with you until now? It's a great question. I've recorded some brilliant ones. And I said to someone the other day, I should probably look back and listen to them because we record them and you don't really listen back to them a lot of the time part when you're editing it. So I've done some with some amazing people, like Jim Colleton, CEO of Nautilus Aligned. I've done a couple of Aligned Energy in the States, which is a great company. Matt Pullins, Cyrus One, CEO in Europe. I recorded one last week, which comes out this week, with Chad Harris, who's a Winston Data Center, that's building a Bitcoin mining data center in Texas. So there's so many different stories. And then there's a recorded one a long time ago with Jack Harris, who's a recent graduate, just started in the sector. There's so many different people and different stories. And until you speak to them and find out their career, you don't really know what you're getting. So you've got the two extremes, I guess, those technical geniuses that you just listen to and the entrepreneurs like Mike Tobian, who you can talk to all day and learn so much about, to the people that are actually just started in the industry and finding out why they're there, what brought them there and from their perspective, how we can attract more people. So I wouldn't like to say one, because one of my guests might be watching and I don't want to have a favorite, but there's some amazing episodes. And I think just the opportunity to talk to these people has really benefited my knowledge and hopefully it's helped a few other people as well. It always is. It's amazing to see what's happening in the industry. And as we were saying before we came on camera as well, we're talking about the new faces coming into the sector, especially during COVID. And we can't wait to go back to an event, real life event and hopefully not know 50% of the people there. They'll be amazing. Exactly. And I always say like, it'd be great to just hire a pub and just have everyone in the pub in London or wherever it is in the world and just have a chat about the sector because there's so many great people in it. Everyone wants to help each other. We all want to talk about it, but it's been difficult to get that platform to do it face to face. And hopefully, I said this last year, but hopefully next year we can definitely do it. Hopefully next year definitely we should do it. And let's hope that things get better from here. But Andy, thank you so much for your time. And thank you to our viewers as well for tuning into JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. And don't forget to check our social channels for more content. Until next time, happy networking.