 Hi, everyone, and welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell coming to you today from Data Cloud Global Congress 2021. Joining me is Sean Farney, Director of Data Center Marketing for Kohler Power. Sean, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, Barb, thanks for having me. Excited to be talking about data centers today. Yeah, this is our first time having you on our JSA TV platform. We're super excited to have you here. And I'd love it if you could give our viewers, our audience, just a bit of an overview on Kohler Power and specifically the data center division and how you guys are supporting the industry. Sure, sure, thanks. And I think most of your audience will know Kohler in general for 148 years. Now we've been making faucets and showers and kitchen gear and bathroom gear. But a smaller amount of people know about Kohler Power. We've been in the business for 101 years now and we've been making generators for a long time. So one of the first in the industry and fast forward to today, we're the number three manufacturer of generators in the world and we offer a full ecosystem of data center products. So switch gear and closures, generators, UPS. So we can really help data center providers with all their equipment needs. So, I mean, that's a lot of history and a lot of, I mean, it makes sense that you're providing all of this given your expertise, but why was it important to you? You know, in what way did you want to support the data center world, the data center ecosystem? Yeah, so for the last 10 years, the importance of and global footprint of data centers has been expanding rapidly. It's a great story, right? You know, cagers of 20% plus a lot of private equity money going into the space. And it's because in this fourth industrial revolution that we're in today, no one deletes anything, specifically our teenage children, right? Everything stays on a phone forever and pictures and videos and Snapchats and Instagram and so on and so forth. And what that does on the backend is create and grow data centers. That's simply what's going on. And the Kohler family who's been involved and is still involved in day-to-day basis and in making strategic business decisions has decided again to boldly go in a new direction to expand business and product lines. So kitchen and bath, you know, check very successful power systems been doing that for 100 years. Now there's this innovative new thought to expand and focus on data centers because of this growth and because of their role in society and culture and fourth industrial revolution and so on and so forth. So we're taking this new focus on data centers and orienting our product lines and the entire ecosystem of products really to appeal to data center operators and more specifically hyperscale data center operators. And a great example of that is our four megawatt generator, largest on the market. That is geared for the largest hyperscale data center operators today. So we're doing a lot of things. We're expanding our global factory expansion or production capabilities. We're expanding space and building out new capabilities, adding products and product lines really to support this data center phenomena. Well, and I think you also just, you recently unveiled what you're calling the global power partners program. Can you talk a bit about what that means to Kohler but more specifically, you know what it means for your customers and the customer experience? Sure, sure. It's a great campaign recently released. Hopefully you've seen it or if not, we'll see it soon. But all we're doing is calling attention to our robust global capabilities around service and support. So we've got 800 distributors, 10,000 dealers, 18 manufacturing locations and 15 logistics hubs around the world. And for years and years and years now, we've been producing gear and selling to customers and supporting our customers out of all those locations and distributions. And we're just calling it out. And we built the campaign really around people. It's actually videos of our global sales team talking about customer experiences and how we can make them better because the linchpin of a great product experience and a great product and great support is people, right? People make it happen. So that's really the focus of that campaign and why we chose to just talk to our people about our customers and things we're doing globally and our global capabilities. And we will continue to emphasize the importance of people in what we do and how we're doing it and the success of our products. Yeah, amazing. I think that, and it sounds like that fits very nicely in with just your overall approach from Kohler as a whole organization, really, to the market, right? And yeah. It's one of the great things about Kohler. It's a privately held company, been around a long time. And the reason for that is our culture and what our company is built on. And you'll hear around Kohler and our products and certainly from the Kohler family, this idea of gracious living that's actually embodied in our mission statement. We want to, for our customers, make the customer and product experience gracious. And Global Power Partner really calls that out. It's our people and what we can do to be nimble and responsive to our customers, supporting our generators and UPS and enclosures and other data center products. So it's a great tie-in, again, that goes back to people and what people can enable. Yeah, what a great value proposition and a great value set for you guys. I want to talk a little bit for just a minute about sustainability, just to sort of shift gears pretty dramatically, but it's so important, so important to the data center industry as a whole right now globally. Could you talk about Kohler's position on this and how your solutions help to empower a greener future for the industry? Sure, I would say for the data center industry, it's agenda item number one right now. And we're excited to be building and engineering products around sustainability. But even at a broader level, Kohler, the company up in Kohler, Wisconsin, right over there, sustainability is huge for us. We're over half renewable energy in our production manufacturing and operational facilities. We've saved almost 300 billion gallons of water via our WaterSense product line since we released it and we've reduced our landfill refuse almost by half since 2008. So Kohler as a company is focusing on sustainability, board level item, right? And in the data center space, same thing. We're taking both a revolutionary approach to sustainability and an evolutionary approach in sustainability in the data center space. And what I mean by that is we are investigating, researching, testing, developing, producing hydrogen fuel cell products, for example. This is to really replace or lessen the importance of diesel generators in the backup power product lines for data centers down the road once that technology is perfected. And that's a revolutionary brand new product, a big change. And we're very positive about our hydrogen fuel cell developments and the role that'll play in the industry going forward. But we're also taking an evolutionary approach to sustainability in the data center space. And a great example is something we're working on right now where we're about to publish a white paper which will recommend a whole new way of doing tests and maintenance routines across the data center industry which is kind of along the lines of continuous improvement or an evolutionary approach to sustainability. And these new routines will reduce the amount of fuel burnt and our emissions by around 50% better in some cases. And that's a big deal across very large scale data center deployments for some of our customers. So we will continue to continuously improve and evolve what we're doing in products while in parallel also exploring these revolutionary approaches hydrogen fuel cell. They're very, very exciting. We also work in partnership very closely in the US with the EPA to align and build to the tier four final specification. And this specification is used to ensure that emissions meet a certain level. So our product set is very robust to meet the tier four final product specifications to filter air and in some cases, exhaust air that comes out cleaner than when it came in. So that's an exciting area where we lead and we're really proud of our products. That's yeah, it's so interesting to hear all of the great things you're doing. I feel like we could have a whole separate interview and conversation on that. And speaking of which another thing I think we could probably have a whole another conversation on with you is, some of the other key things and ways that the industry is evolving key drivers that are impacting the data center landscape. Any sort of just a quick top line on that to sort of maybe just do an intro of what we can talk about with the future. Sure, I'll try. It's a great fireside chat for sure. But we don't have hours in a word or two words, digital transformation. So everyone's heard of this, right? Digital transformation is a technology movement taking place across the globe in corporate enterprise environments. And it really just means liberating data, making accessible, allowing for nimble access to data because it drives innovation, it drives revenue, it drives value creation, having access to data and the insights that data give you quickly. And so this is a board level imperative right now. Everyone's doing it, change or die. And what that means at the enterprise IT level is migrating to cloud environments, specifically Microsoft's Azure product and Amazon's AWS product and Google's GCP product. And those cloud environments are all at the end of the day just data centers, right? So digital transformation is driving massive movement to the cloud more and more data. Today's generations don't delete anything. So that's not changing and it's growing and it still looks like this, the rate that we consume and create data. It's really amazing. And so this has translated to and will continue to translate to a massive data center boom. It's been going on 10 years. It's gonna go on a lot longer. The hyper scale data center providers, a small group of them spend $150 billion US every year on building data centers. There's 600 of these hyper scale data centers today. It's increasing by 10 to 20%. So it's really amazing, this context of digital transformation in what it means and what it does to our digital economy. And it's really a central part of this fourth industrial revolution. So fascinating stuff as a contact with all kinds of great discussion points underneath. Interesting. Yeah, I really look forward to having that conversation with you further. I mean, you've scratched the surface but in a really, really interesting way. So I appreciate that. Can you just sort of as a parting note to us, as we sort of wrap up this interview today, just anything we should be watching for from Kohler over the next few months, sort of short term things that we can keep our eyes out for? Yeah, we're gonna continue to grow our data center specific product set. And we're gonna knit those things together. We really wanna be a one-stop shop for data center customers. You wanna make that, make for a gracious buying experience and product experience for our customers. So you will see some exciting new product lines and product extensions to do that and help our customers continue to build out at this torrid pace through data center footprints. Nice. Well, great, thank you so much, Sean. As we wrap, where can we direct our viewers if they wanna find out more information on Kohler and your support of the data center market? Sure, sure. All of our information is online at kohlerpower.com and I recommend either folks can reach out to myself if you wanna have a conversation and or follow our Kohler data center LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, which have all of this content and more on a daily basis. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sean. We really appreciate your time. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking. Thanks everyone.