 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jean-Marc Lema and joining me today is Seamus Duhn, Managing Director for Interaction Ireland, part of Global Data Center for Digital Realty. Seamus, thanks so much for joining us. How have you been doing over the last 12 months? Well, it's been an interesting 12 months with the lockdown. Here in Ireland, it's been like most of the place since it's been a pretty strict lockdown. So a lot of looking after the staff, but similarly you saw from the quarterly results from some big hyperscalers, business has been strongly strong. So there's been a lot of growth and we've been quite busy. And luckily, we've managed to keep up and running no downtime while we're expanding a lot. So it's been a tough year for everybody, but for us, there's been a lot of growth and we've been extremely busy. And we need a lot more growth coming in the next few months and years. But just to give you a bit of background, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got involved with the data center world and what does interaction Ireland's? I think most people will know what it does, but it just gives it a beautiful review of the business. Yeah, that's a great question for my point of view. I'm coming up on my second anniversary here with Interaction Digital Realty Company. Prior to this, I was a vice president and general manager based in Houston, Texas for a business in Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So a strong enterprise IT background at a global scale, lived in the United States and no travels did business in 170 countries. The reason I joined this company, specifically Interaction in Europe, was I could see where things were going, not just the transition to cloud computing, but the whole transformation of IT infrastructure and what it meant for business. And co-location data centers with connectivity rich platform with on-ramps to big public cloud service providers and SaaS providers was the future of IT. And I think we're just in the middle, probably at the early stage of a big transition. The cloud has been, transition to the cloud has been a trend in IT, but I think you're going to see a level of digital transformation in the next five to ten years that will rival what we've seen for the previous time. And that's why I joined this company. In Ireland specifically, well, digital reality acquired interaction and it's now one of the biggest data center, co-location and connectivity businesses in the world operating across six continents. And there's been a lot of integration work between digital reality and interaction in Europe, but particularly for us in Ireland, it's been quite, it's really changed for the better, particularly an in-bounds foreign direct investment style economy like we have in Ireland. Being acquired by a US company, which is just strong brand in the United States, has been a bit of a game changer and it's given us also a scale that we didn't have previously. So I spend a lot of time with my colleagues in the United States working on our business here in Ireland and integrating the two organizations. You said a lot of things that I would like to pick up and we will dissect your answer. I mean, starting with the industry itself, what you said is quite interesting that we are kind of in the middle of this transition. Now in the next five to ten years, it's going to be, it's going to transform the way we do things and the way business operates and how much we have to serve the market with. I would say the data center industry in Europe probably really start booming in the early 2010s. So I guess we are halfway the journey now, so the consolidation and now we're going into the expansion phase. But focusing on Ireland, I mean, Ireland is one of the most active markets in Europe. If not probably top three most active at the moment, which makes it one of the most active in the world. How do you describe the current market in Ireland, especially around Dublin, but even just beyond Dublin as well? Because this is the second topic that everyone is talking about. It's Ireland is not just Dublin anymore. There's Galway, there's all the other places. Tell us, I mean, I'm not going to carry on adding your words to my question. OK, well, Ireland is an interesting place. It's obviously relatively small in terms of population. But it's it's a bridge economy like there are some others, you know, like Singapore, perhaps a similarities in Asia, but it's different here. Ireland's a member of the European Union, you know, one of the biggest markets in the world and a very committed member of that. Ireland's the youngest population in Europe, significantly the youngest, very high portions of education and a lot of strong links with the United States. So very much a bridge between Europe and the United States historically. So there's a lot of it's a good and easy place to do business. And it's a strategy that's been worked on by successive administrations here in Ireland to be an easy place to do business and an attractive place to locate location, headquarter, your European base. And that's that's a couple of decades old. So some of the biggest names in, you know, the tech industry, particularly, but also the pharma and med tech industry have located their European HQs in in in in Ireland. And as you mentioned, different different cities around the the country, you know, pharmaceuticals and med tech is very clustered around the south. You know, medical device manufacturing in the West and, you know, a lot of the bigger new tech industries, more in Dublin, but actually Apple, for example, have a big presence in in the south and cork. So quite quite dispersed. So, you know, that's how the economy works. And, you know, with with not just the tech industry, but also the pharma industry has been quite a significant amount of growth from a foreign direct investment to this year. In fact, you'd have seen an article not too long ago in the Wall Street Journal, you know, citing that Ireland, in fact, was one of the few Western economies that actually he grew in the last year. Ironically, even though the local economy suffered like everybody else, you know, with with lockdowns and, you know, the consumer based economy, but the growth in both pharma and med tech and and technology as you've seen from recent quarterly announcements, you know, has created, you know, quite a growth level here. That's driven the economy in Ireland a lot. I mean, sorry, Korean. Yeah, I was going to address you had that specifically translates into, you know, the data center business. As you said, it's quite active. Dublin is is one of perhaps the biggest data center footprints of any metro in Europe, ironically, even though Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris are are huge, you know, the so-called flap. The difference in Ireland probably is there's a lot of hyperscale cloud service provider businesses who actually build their own capacity a lot more than they would do on other locations. You know, they've they, you know, a lot of cloud service providers, the big guys, you know, they launched their their cloud services business, you know, when you think about it, 10 years or so ago, and they did that at a Dublin, probably Dublin and Amsterdam was how they launched into Europe, you know, after the United States. So, you know, they had a lot of competence to build their own capacity. So that's that's probably 70% of the market in Dublin. And that's that's probably the core driver. It's interesting how it's evolving over over the years. You know, the next tier down SAS providers particularly, they're creating a lot of the growth as well. And now more and more, you know, Asian companies, you know, from China, but not just China are entering Europe and creating some of the scale that the US tech companies did, you know, for the last 10 years. So capacity is huge and only expanding. In fact, COVID probably drove growth and accelerated probably more than it would have done if this had never happened. So yeah, that's it's quite dynamic here at the moment. Yeah, I mean, I find Ireland quite fascinating because I've been following that markets, the specific markets quite close over the especially since 2016. I mean, you guys came out of the financial crisis in 2018, you managed to rebuild the economy and you almost became a digital Celtic Tiger of your previous issues. So I mean, I think you guys done amazing in that sense. But one resource that people often talk about as a caveat when it comes to building IT infrastructure is power. People say Ireland doesn't have enough power. We've seen that your national greed and the government are now getting more involved in building more. But what do you have to tell people they still bring up the conversation around power? You know, listen, there'd be plenty of power if there wasn't such a commitment in the country to sustainability. And you know, what's actually been happening here over the last number of years is a commitment to guess to sustainable energy and renewable energy. In fact, the targets that's been announced by the government and right now the Green Party are part of a coalition in the government. So that's helping to drive and accelerate the commitment is to get to 70% of the grid power to be from renewable energy, particularly wind. You know, there's more wind energy than a country will ever need, but the target is to get to 70%. So there's a lot of infrastructure. What's happening now is a lot of historic power came from heavy fossil fuels, which was oil, peat, coal and those power plants are being decommissioned as we speak. There's been quite a number of announcements here about decommissioning heavy fossil fuel generators, generating stations and there's a transition. But in the transition, there's pressure on the grid. Right at a time and growth is needed across the whole economy, but certainly in the data center business. And the transition is to move towards, you know, gas generation as an interim solution until the grid can be upgraded to take the capacity for the investments in wind energy, both onshore, but more and more offshore. Sure, there's a consultation process going on at the moment from the grid management company, AirGrid. With the government, there's I think six weeks or so left of consultation to make decisions. But the targets get to 70% renewable energy and in the meantime, you know, transition from heavy fossil fuels to gas to bridge that capacity needs. So the growth is still going to happen. It's just in a different way, all driven by, you know, getting to, you know, more renewable energy on the grid. Well, it's just quite an exciting transformation. I'm happening even outside the data center, but then going to come into the data center. And speaking of facilities and correct me if I'm mistaken, you've got six facilities at the moment in service in and out of Dublin. What expansion plans have you got? Are you going to be expanding on your any of these buildings? Are you going to be building data center number seven, eight, nine, ten? Are you going to go out of Dublin? Are we going to see an interaction data center in Cork, for example? I've no announcements to make about, you know, we look at everything as you can imagine. We've actually got 11 data centers, actually 11 data centers right now in Dublin. And we have some pretty significant deployments in them. And we've decided that we're going to, you know, expand that capacity and footprint as well. The demand is there from some of our bigger clients. And then in actual fact, the integration, the acquisition of digital reality, the acquisition from digital reality of interaction has created significantly more demand with our presence in the United States. So, you know, helping to, you know, contract more business. So yes, we will. We will be, you know, adding significantly more capacity, you know, to our presence here in Dublin. We've no announcements about, you know, moving outside of Dublin, but we'll always examine us. I one of the key things that's going on is investment in the submarine cable capacity into Ireland. There's been a couple of big announcements with AEC2 landing in the West Coast. You know, we're going to hear some more stuff about investment in capacity from subsea cable networks. You know, we're talking with, you know, all of our partners and including GTT who will make an announcement pretty soon, you know, on their plans and, you know, and others, you know, we contract with them all. So huge subsea cable networks, particularly between the United States and Ireland and into Europe. And so yeah, I mean, demand is just going to go. The local demand has stagnated, I have to say. You know, so a lot of the growth in the past 12 months has been from, you know, large US HQs, companies in Ireland for European capacity. Local demand has kind of stalled a little bit and enterprise, you know, non-tech demand has paused, let's say, and we're starting to see projects now picking up that we so we expect that market to begin to increase in the second half of this year and into 22. It probably wasn't a bad thing for us. It gave us some breathing space to expect, you know, the multiple segments in the market to begin growing, you know, in the second half of the year and next year. Would you say that its stagnation was sort of, it was a dire impact of the pandemic or just because of them? Yes. Yeah, no devs. A number of projects were put on hold, you know, transformation projects and businesses, you know, you could not be able to travel, you know, the whole switch to remote working, you know, whereas that created some demand, particularly network capacity and cloud services, it also created a pause for, you know, some IT projects that were planned, the transformation project products, expansion product projects, but an actual fact, ironically, even though it created a pause, it also proved the necessity for IT transformation and digital transformation in general, you know, it's more important than ever and that's realized. So we expect, you know, this pause, you know, the pause button that was pressed to, you know, come on stock and actually we're going to see more acceleration in digital transformation type projects right across the enterprise segment of business. So and they'll go faster. I don't think anybody doubts, you know, the need for an understanding that every business is a digital business. There's nobody, there's nobody that doesn't require digital technology to run their business. And then when you take some of the other mega trends around IoT, the implementation of 5G, you know, cloud migration, these things are all just kind of accelerating the need for those projects to happen, you know, even though it's sort of paused for the last 12 months. Yeah, and I mean, and there's no way back once you go digital, you can't go back and if you're not digital, you can't exist almost. You need to get out of the bottle and yeah, I, you know, I do the thing is the network and the need for speed got the biggest test it's ever gotten in the last 12 months. Do you consider the speed that loads of businesses, including ours, suddenly switched to remote working and running our businesses in remote ways requiring us to do these interviews. I can remember 18 months ago, you were here in Dublin. We, we, we were at the talk face to face, but look at us now. But the network has passed this test, you know, the huge test and in a way it was an experiment that, you know, was proven you can go faster and you should. Yeah, I mean, the networks is one thing that we have to give that to operators that they've worked out brilliantly over the last year because you haven't really heard any stories of massive voltages and down times or anything. There was the odd one here and then slower speeds, but nothing, there were everything to stand still. So I mean, I can only imagine if this was happening without us having digital, I think you'll see an employment rates and things would have been a lot worse than they are. It would have been devastating. Yeah, it could have been a lot worse. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's all very well and to be fair to, you know, some of the announcements recently from, you know, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft and Azure and from Apple, the demand has really increased and we, you know, no surprise there, but it's, it's, you know, they've been successful and things have accelerated and it's not slow. Yeah. The other thing to this is like everything that we're living through kind of was going to happen anyway. The petition is going to take us 10 years to get to this stage. We kind of just advanced in the special 12 months. I mean, the network quote, so you can only imagine like, do we really need to wait 10 years to evolve to something else? This, this is it. So, you know, there's no excuse to wait around anymore. The need to do it is there. It's not a risk. It's a risk not to do it. It's a risk to go slow. So, so that's compelling. The other thing I'd say is it, the need for digital transformation is a global need. We're finding that, you know, in our business, having a global presence is most of the big enterprises. When we take a focus on the top 2,000 to 5,000 accounts or businesses in the world, they need global partners for, for most of what they do. You know, you can't do one thing in, in Ireland and a different thing in Germany or the United States or Japan, you know, you need a global platform. That's why we've doubled down and investing in platform digital, for example. And, you know, you get a consistency of not just co-location services, but connectivity and implementing on a platform that's consistent globally. And that that's going to be very well understood a lot more now because of this acceleration. Yeah, I mean, you got to be global locally nowadays. So even if you're a coffee shop, you're on the internet, you're global. But just to give us a quick glimpse into expansion plans, not just in Ireland now, but across Europe, what's interaction and digital reality preparing, let's say the next 12 months, because I'm sure you have a lot of construction going on on the back of all this as well. It's very exciting. So let me, I speak with my counterparts in Spain, in Switzerland, in Copenhagen, in Vienna. One of them said in the next three years, he will he will grow and expand more than he did in the previous 10. And and that's what we're seeing with not just the so Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris, that there are huge growth areas, but now spreading more across across Europe. That capacity is being driven from everything we were just saying before. We've also made some acquisitions. So, you know, and growth our presence now is in Croatia and Greece. And you'll see it a lot more also in Africa. And you know, you're going to see a bit more of that. And you know, as they as those locations join the global platform with a lot more growth to be created. It's not just in central locations, but, you know, in most of the cities. The other thing we're seeing is, you know, data traffic is exploding. Obviously the growth of data is exploding. So Marseille, for example, is a huge growth area because it's it's it's where a lot of submarine cable systems are landing from Asia from the Middle East also from Africa. You know, that's similar is happening in Portugal and Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. That's creating growth, you know, as we're also seeing in Ireland and, you know, places like Copenhagen. So that that's data traffic and data gravity actually as we'll talk about if where that data is existing is driving growth in our business and and in the digital economy in general. So it's yeah, it's it's there's a it's not going to slow. Are you going away? So we get ahead. Well, there's a lot going on and I mean, you mentioned some locations there that some I could go on and on and on now for hours talking about them, especially the Iberian Peninsula. But Seamus, if people would like to learn more about the business and your next announcements and what's coming and keep up to that with everything, where can our viewers go to and register their interest? Well, in in Europe, we're branded as Interaction, a digital Realty company. So you can go to interaction.com and we put all of our announcements there. It's good to follow us on LinkedIn more and more where you, you know, like everybody else we're using platforms like LinkedIn to to communicate and globally digital reality and platform digital. You can you can access information about about them to digital Realty.com and learn about things like data gravity and, you know, our data gravity index. So what interaction.com for our business in Europe is the place to go. Okay, Seamus. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I thought it was very insightful and there's a lot of stuff there to follow up with me. And thank you all viewers as well for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA broadcasts and don't forget to check out social channels for more content. Until next time. Happy networking.