 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell coming to you today from Monaco where we're at Data Cloud 2022. In person, fantastic to be together. Gary Connelly is here joining us today from host in Ireland. Thank you for joining us. Hi, Barb. It's great to be here. We're sort of giddy, aren't we? We're sort of giddy to be beside each other and sort of looking at people. It's just great. Thank you for having me on the show. I think that's a really good way of describing sort of the mood here today. But can you just tell our audience a little bit? Just sort of go back in time. You're celebrating five years now with host in Ireland. So you've reached a milestone. Can you talk to us about sort of what your inspiration was to begin host in Ireland in the first place and your sort of contributions towards sustainability? It's a great question because it was actually a bet. It was a bet that a lot of the industry leaders at the time said, you know what? We need to collaborate. So I came up with a term. I said, okay, let's set up a co-opetition. And a co-opetition is exactly what it says. It's cooperation between competitors. So we started with five, you know, Equinix, Interaction, Digital Realty. And now we're 51 and it's a community. It's all the different layers of the design, the build, the operation. None are more important than the other. And the most important aspect is the people because the people actually make what is in essence a collaboration community that actually, you know, they help improve each other as people. And then that spawns out into the data center industry. So that's really what it's about. No more. And I really want to hear about one of your programs called DCs for Bs. I've seen there's a few things happening around here to hint to that. But can you tell us about that? Yeah, there's a genuine global problem with pollinators. The pollinators are the little fellas that you see, the bees in particular. And globally, about 50% of them are facing extinction. Now it's a little bit different than say the white nose rhino or the lion or the other. They seem distant, don't they? They sort of, we can't really help them. But the bee, we all have in our backyards. So we actually reached out two years ago to the National Biodiversity Center in Ireland. And we said, can we help you? And they said, yeah, we really need help because we're scientists. We're not all together great communicators like you guys and maybe what we do. And we said, we will try and specifically improve pollinators' food sources. Flowers, trees, orchards. So it was quite amazing because once we said we're doing orchards, people said, okay, I have a local biodiversity group. They have loads of enthusiasm. They have loads of energy, but they have no money. So we came along and we said, well, why don't we actually work with the biodiversity? And now we're at 1,500 orchards throughout the whole of the country. And the great thing about orchards, probably boring your audience now, but they're the first flowering thing in spring. And the lads wake up, the bees wake up starving and they go straight to the orchards. So effectively what it's done is, and the DCs for bees initiative, and a subset of that is orchards in the community. And orchards in the community has two things. Our community of digital people, but more importantly, what we don't do well in the digital infrastructure space is explain what we do to the greater population. They think they're just big gray boxes that use a lot of energy and they don't do anything. This way we reach into the community, into nursing homes, into schools, and we offer them an orchard. And suddenly they say, oh, I haven't had that before. Somebody's giving me something. So it actually is connecting our community to their community. And DCs for bees is now going global. It's just an amazing thing to see because bees are in trouble everywhere. Well, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but well, first of all, I wanna congratulate you because you're now officially a best-selling author. You are in this book, Greener Data. And in it, I believe you talk about this a little bit, don't you, the DCs for bees? Absolutely. My English teacher when I was in high school would be absolutely horrified, wouldn't he, to think that I am actually a best-selling author, to think that I don't know T-H-E-I-R from T-H-E-R-E. But anyway, it was a great collaboration. It's 20 odd people looking at the industry of data from totally different angles, not all saying the same thing and actually saying we can do better, we should do better, and this is how we can do better. And the little bee fellas make it don't, because of alphabetical order, I'm number two. I'm the second person. And if you know anything about books, most people only read about two chapters, so I'm really happy. That's right. Yeah, it's a movement, I think. Greener Data, hashtag Greener Data. There it is. And there's a website. Are we number one? Did we make it to number one? We made it to number one, yes, yep. Best-selling. Congratulations. Well done. We're in France, so we'll do the two cheese. That's fantastic, yeah. No, and so, yeah, congratulations. Yeah, it's great. And it launched on Earth Day, so it went quickly. It was great, actually, because again, the whole essence of Hosting Ireland's co-operative collaboration, bringing different people from different continents, different people from different, and that's what JSA did, right? You guys basically reached out, said we want to hear from people. What's on your mind? What do you think we should be telling people? So to get 20 odd, it's pretty cool. And six months. And the hope is that it carries on from here, right? This isn't the beginning and end, it's just the beginning, so yeah, we're excited. And so just lastly, as we think about the future, let's sort of cast our eyes forward from here. What are you most excited about for Hosting Ireland and for the industry? What I'm most excited about is the fact that data in the centers is the oxygen or the steam of this industrial revolution. And we're finally now moving into a phase where people realize that data, and what it does, not just Netflix, not just Facebook, health systems, you know, all of the great stuff that's been accelerated through COVID because of our dependency on it, is now becoming mainstream. The other thing I'm really excited about, I don't know about the United States, but the data center people in Ireland and in Europe were actually, during COVID, we're seen as essential workers. So you had this elevation of oh, health workers, digital workers, it's a utility. And as we go forward, it's gonna start to become part of the narrative of we can't do a lot of what we have to do, we just change our behavior, reduce carbon, we can't do it without data. And the data that's in the centers is what's given the smarts to our cars, to our grids and all the rest of it. So I'm actually excited to see that evolve where we're less talking about centers and more talking about data, because there's two words in data center. And it's a bit like, you know, we don't talk much about substations anymore. We talk about electricity. So where we are at the moment is everyone's obsessed with the hardware when actually it's now evolving into the smarts. So I'm really excited about that. I'm also excited about the youth coming into the industry. There's genuine people that say, I want to be in the data industry. Kids, they're coming from their rooms where they're immersed in all the gaming. So the digital space is just them. So that whole space, oh, we need hardware, we need that, we need this, but they're actually using their MIPS to develop the next wave. So I think it's the time now for more females, for more minority groups, less bald-headed, gray-haired blokes. We need to just go into the background, corral more of the youth, and actually give them the lead. So I'm looking here and I see more females. I see more youth. I see, well, I see alcohol over there. So that's obviously gonna be a good night. But in general, there's a general mood change, right? And that's what I'm excited about. Yeah, brilliantly said on all counts. I think there's a lot to look forward to. And Gary, thank you. Thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure, pleasure to see you. Yeah, it's great to see everybody. Yeah. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.