 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome to our new podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Okitaya, CEO and founder of JSA. And along with me, my co-host, co-conspirator, top B2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Christel. Evan. How are you? Happy new year. And welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with the most influential folks in today's leading data center and telco world, supporting the network infrastructure requirements of this new normal. Jamie, are you a gadget person? Love gadgets. I live and breathe technology. Just... Of course. Well, we have CES at the moment, which has gone virtual and the biggest consumer tech show of the year kind of sets the stage for a lot of tech. Is that something you've been into in the past at CES? My husband definitely attends annually. I'm always traveling or prepping for PTC with my other data center telecom folks. So I don't get a chance to actually walk the floor ever, but do you walk the floor? Like, are you actually there? I'm always reading the headlines for sure. I am. I'm normally there. I'll be glued to the screen virtually this time. But I'm always looking for that next cool emerging gadget or tech that can somehow make my life better. Maybe, you know, this is one I acquired over the holidays. It's called Aura. It's a ring wearable and it basically tracks sleep and temperature and movement and steps and calories and all kinds of good stuff. And it's charged once a week. It's waterproof. So that was a CES discovery. And I'm sure there's something cool to find this year as well. So it's like an Apple watch for your finger. It is. It is. So wearables and digital health is a big area focus at CES. But let's get on to our guest. I think we have a good one this week. Yeah. And let's get right into it. We have one of the major data movers of our industry with us today. I'm so excited to welcome Mr. Avner, Pappachato, CEO of Serverfond. Avner, welcome to Data Movers. Hello, Jamie. Hello, Evan. Good to see you and welcome Avner, CEO of Serverfond. So Avner, how many servers do you grow on your farm? That's my first question. It's highly seasonal. Seasonal. You know, I thought that. But in all seriousness, we used to talk about Serverfond. Now it's all we talk about data center and cloud. And I love my Serverfond back in the day. So tell me what is and who is Serverfond? Serverfond is a company that we established around the mid 2000s. We're actually have been in data center business since the late 90s. And we started looking at this telecom boom. First was the, was more switching and Sealex and all that coming into our office buildings at the time wanting to rent space and not have people in it. You know, have a bunch of cables and equipment. It looked interesting. We've done a couple of those. Then we saw that a lot of people had the same ideas, but not enough clients. So we stopped and it was the bust. We continued to buy telecom facilities for a while and then established the name Serverfond. It's our, we're farmers that mostly feed electricity and air conditioning. And we provide mostly wholesale services, but really we provide a lot of services to a lot of clients. Our goal is really to make the physical part of the digital world efficient. We see everything, we see data centers as a very young industry. And really a very inefficient industry right now as far as the physical part grows. And we have looked at it and studied it and developed a lot of software and practices around it and we'll get more into it later on. But really the goal is to make the physical simple and let people concentrate on running applications. Yeah, I love that. And that brings me back to when we first chatted in your office in LA, which has a beautiful view of a runway and knowing your pilot and your interest in aeronautics. Just the efficiency a pilot must have to lift off to launch a plane into the air and take those many people or things into the air and keep them safe during this whole passage. The efficiency, the checklist, the attention to detail. I feel like you bring all that to our data center space. Yeah, it's really about running critical operations. And if you think about critical operations, aviation is one of the most critical operations people execute, people do. And it's pretty amazing how many operations the aviation industry does and how good they have become at not crashing, at running critical operations safely. And that's through a lot of things. That's through a lot of learning through the years. It's through very good design, very good operation matrix, following checklists, learning from previous mistakes, maintenance procedures and a lot of things that us in our young industry we can really learn a lot from. And I love aviation, I love design, I love redundancy. There's a couple of things that aviation has that data centers don't have. Obviously the different industries. We're not that concerned with weight. Aviation is, so they have to bring redundancy, only the redundancy they need. And through the years you learn about it, the too much weight and actually too much redundancy can create problems. So I think as an industry, we can learn a lot from industries that have done other critical operations and help, learning from other people's mistake is always a smart thing to do in my book, paying less tuition. Yeah, great advice. And unlike the aviation industry, the data center industry is going through a bit of a boom, a boomlet, given this new reality we're in. And you've taken a nice approach of prioritizing this modernization over just buildouts and capacity. Can you discuss that kind of trade-off? Yeah, again, it has to do with the fact that we've been here, A, we've been here for a while, B, we like efficiency. We really have a couple of plays in the industry, but efficiency and being green is a part of it. There's a lot of buildings that are very good buildings that could be reused as data centers. And we looked for them early on, we have a number of them, some of them just couldn't be replicated today with dollars like our Titan building in Eastern Washington was built as the headquarters for the Titan missile program. It's built to withstand a 10 megaton atomic explosion within half a mile. You couldn't replicate it. And it's built to move air. You could not build a better data center shell and it's there now has the benefit of having three cent power when we use an existing building our greenhouse footprint is diminished by a lot as compared to destroying a building and building a new building. So we like that in a lot of other places like in Chicago, it takes us downtown where we can get better infrastructure, better electricity, better power and you just couldn't build this building downtown. And it just gets us into that environment. And I think it's gonna happen more and more. There's gonna be a lot of Greenfield data centers that we do as well in places where we can't get existing but a lot of the more inner city dense, last mile kind of data centers are going to be re-adaption of existing buildings. And that takes me to look back to 2020, obviously unprecedented year. I hate saying that because everyone calls it that but very difficult year for many companies yet server farm, obviously you guys were thriving. You launched in command knock providing data center management services for global brands. You added your Toronto facility during the pandemic. You accomplished a $200 million recapitalization. Can you tell us what do you attribute to this success? First of all, thank you. And really it's obviously the industry has been in growth but in our part, it's really great people. We have really great people working in the company in a lot of disciplines. We're very good at the basic design and operations of data center. We have Sam Brown running design and build. He delivered the data center in Toronto in the hardest time, on time, on budget. Couldn't be more appreciative to him. We have a great operating part with Jim Shanahan and Mike Whitman that built the crew there. And we have a very nice and basically the in command staff the people that actually take and get our customers as much information as they can about their operation and data centers probably as much as your sleeping aid and your body tracking gadget that you bought. We try to do the same for data center customers. We tell them how well the servers are awake, sleeping, how much electricity they're taking. If they're efficient, if they wanna bring more that they need more power, more space, we try to right size everybody. And all these disciplines together have a lot of demand and we see it, we just try to solve problems for our customers and it seems to be working. And talk a little bit more about that in command platform which as I understand it, it provides a cloud-like experience for data centers. How is this more than just another data center infrastructure management software? It's data center infrastructure management as a service. So we basically provide our clients, whether it's within our data centers or in their own data centers or other providers data centers as much information as we can about their physical layout, there's the physical implementation. So we let them know what each rack is doing, how much electricity is taking, is it really backed up? Are there any problems in the data center? Is there maintenance coming? What's gonna be affected with the maintenance? And we do a lot of, once we have all the information we do a lot of what ifs, what if I wanted to change these servers to the next generation of servers? Do I have enough space, do I have enough power, do I have, can I do it within my racks? Do I have to change it? Is there downtime? We do that for all the physical aspects of the data center, electrical, mechanical and network. And we're gonna have some very exciting network things coming, adding on to in command in the near future. And we really let people concentrate on running application. The physical is not a problem. We hear about digital transformation a lot. And the cloud is a wonderful thing and public cloud is a wonderful thing. But a lot of customers also have to run applications but don't run very efficiently in public cloud. We try to make running these applications and running physical servers as easy as possible. Whether it's in our place, another place and everything we do. And that's in command is basically we'll take care of the physical, you take care of it. We let give you the freedom to take care of your application layer and your virtual layers. Wow, very cool. It sounds like I could run my data center via an in command app on my smartphone. That would be, that would be dream. So you also recently announced an initiative to develop data centers in Israel, not necessarily known as a hub of data center technology around the world. So tell us about that initiative and when are you anticipating construction there? Yeah, so we have been research, obviously I was born in Israel, not obviously but I was born in Israel and speak the language most of my immediate family is still there. So I have long connections to Israel. Israel, as we know, is a technology leader and all the major companies have big development hubs in Israel. There is a lot of technology coming out of Israel. There's a fascinating book called Startup Nation that can give you a glimpse whoever is interested but Israel puts together a lot of technology. Israel now has some data centers in Israel. A lot of the cloud services they've been getting from overseas. These cloud services because of a few things are coming onshore and they're looking for places to develop in Israel. Like a lot of markets developing in Israel you would need to know what you're doing in the market just the whole construction permit, electricity ability to build different places is very unique to the country. Luckily I come from a family that developed a lot in Israel and we've got a very good handle on that. We also have a very good handle on developing modern data centers. So we enjoy a unique benefit of speaking a couple of languages, speaking the international data center language, developing modern data centers. We also speak Hebrew, we speak Hebrew development and we can create a translation layer to what is becoming a cloud hyperscale and digital transformation way coming to a country who is one of the leader of technology in the world. So it's kind of a perfect storm that we're in the middle and even more exciting. The Middle East is changing and the Middle East is changing along with the world from a fossil fuel type economy looking to the future where it's going to have to find other sources of income, employment and wealth for its people. And they understand the countries around the Middle East understand that they need to work together, I think to achieve a better future for everybody. Therefore we see some peace treatments, we see there's a lot of geopolitical changes coming but what that means is that Israel being a technology leader is going to be in the forefront of providing its neighbors which is a beautiful story. It's the former enemies going to provide them a lot of technology in this road to the future. So that's another reason why Israel is booming, it's not only for itself, it's also as the technology hub to the whole area. Well, Avner, I can't wait to come over to Tel Aviv and take a tour of the data center and along the way spend a couple of weeks on the beach in Tel Aviv. So please keep us up to speed. You know what I love about your story Avner too is you're an Israeli-American, I'm an Italian-American and to bring that international data center language, like you said, I loved that, back to our home countries and to strengthen the economies there and foster those communities, especially in the Middle East. It's such a beautiful heart pole for me and I love that. I also, to get on to the more like personal side of Avner now, interview, I also hear you are an avid surfer. Is that right? Yeah, I surf. By the way, two of the cables coming into Israel are telecom Italia. Oh, I love that. See the connections coming straight from you to us. Love it. So we appreciate the service. So I know, obviously, you're a phenomenal businessman, an aviator, an avid surfer. How did these all work together to build our Avner? It's, first of all, the aviation part is because I lived in Texas for a while. When I got out of school and I couldn't surf, so I had to do something and I'm not a very good team sport player. So if you're in Dallas, Texas, and you're not a very good in team sports and you don't golf, you're pretty much screwed. So I had to do something, so I started flying. That's because I couldn't surf, so that's how that happened. But surfing, I grew up surfing in Israel, which is kind of a weird place. It's like Florida for surfing, it's small wave, and it's definitely not Hawaii, where we should be now. But it's small waves actually create the best surfers in the world. The best surfer in the world is Kelly Slater, who grew up in the West Coast of Florida. And if you can create energy out of a small wave, you can surf a big wave. So it's about energy preservation and knowing how to get, get full without a big push. And I think surfing is a lot like business. You have to choose the right wave that will actually give you a good ride and not just wipe you out. You have to have a little fortitude to know what to get into, what to get out of. You also have to know every once in a while, you have to take a wipe out. So it's a good little analogy to how we live in this world. Phenomenally. Phenomenally answers. I love that. All right. So we are on to our rapid fire section. I love the section. So basically, this is some fun facts we want to learn about you. So tell us the very first thing that comes to mind when we ask you these silly questions. So, okay, here you are in the hot seat. Which instruments do you play, if any? I play guitars and pretty much every string instrument that exists. I actually, here you go, fun fact. I went to music school. I used to play jazz and blues and rock and clubs. I still do. I know you're quite the Renaissance man. It was very Steve Jobske here. Yes. I hear you've got a wonderful new addition to your collection, an Italian delivery during COVID. Tell us more. I had a guy who was a big fan of music. He was a big fan of music. He was. He was a big fan of music. He was a big fan of music. I want to know more about him. Tell us more about him. Tell us more about him. I've got a great collection. An Italian delivery during COVID. Tell us more. I had a guy that sent me an Italian guitar right at the beginning of COVID. Sent it to me from, it was like, from then was fried. When, when the package came, I get to have to wrap it down. There it is, look at this thing. Oh my goodness, what a beauty. It looks like a violin, right? Yeah, look, this guy's the same. All right, favorite wave to surf. It would have to be a cloud break in Fiji, or restaurants in Fiji, but definitely Fiji. Wonderful. The most used app on your phone. Unfortunately, Zoom. That's the 2021, if I've ever heard of it. Yeah, we were looking to change that. All right, this one's Taff, favorite movie. Favorite movie, favorite movie would have to be Napoleon Dynamite. Oh. Wow. Not a traditional choice. The answer here for me is always the Godfather, but that's a good one, alternative. You and my husband like it. Yeah, I have kids. And that brings us to favorite hobbies. That's, there's a lot of competition for that one. I would, at the end of the day, I would still say music. And if you could have dinner with one person dead or alive, who would it be? I thought about this for a little while, and I think I'm gonna stick with Quincy Jones. Nice. Because that's a guy that's a trumpet player, which you wouldn't expect much from, being a trumpet player, that managed to play with all of the people that started jazz, the Miles Davises, the Dizzy Gillespie. Then you started writing and wrote for everybody, Frank Sinatra and so forth, and then jumped generations to producing Michael Jackson, bringing us the French Prince, bringing us, I've never seen somebody who took something and made it so versatile. We need a music podcast, Avenue, that this is far more interesting than a data center, frankly. So. No, I just want to even listen to his music and playlists, like I... Well, we'll put that in the show notes. How about that? Avenue's playlist. I'll actually send you, I'll send you my daughter did once, all of us. Oh, please. It's much better than what I would have done. That's awesome. And talking about daughters, what's your favorite, what's your greatest achievement? So I would say that initially is actually marrying my wife, which produced the other favorite achievement, which is my kids. So that's the sequence of things. I think that still is the favorite achievement. And I actually sat with her yesterday and we, you know, starting to dawn on us that our kids are much smarter than us. And I think that's the best compliment you could ever get. I have a six month old and my husband and I were just saying that yesterday. Like, she just knows way more than I could ever in six months of life. Yeah. It's amazing. So mine are between 21 and nine. So we're the same wife. Oh, and how many three? I have four girls. Four girls, four girls. Oh, fabulous. Yeah. So that's a, and at some point they become this, they're six months old, they're amazing. You get, it's like a bundle of love. You can't, you can't describe it, right? Before, but they become people. They become real people with real personalities. You know, some of it you love unconditionally, some less, but it's just the whole person. It's, it's, it's amazing. It's, to me, it's a beautiful thing to see. It is. And that's, it's a great way to end the show in this time of challenges and lockdown. So you're on my list of one of the persons I must meet this year, if not the end of the year or early next year. So we'll have that to look forward to. We'd love to do it. So, so the goal is to make your, you know, your, your physical things easier to run with a little bit of spirituality. I love it. I'm going to steal that quote from you actually. So that's, that's brilliant. So there you have it guys. Thank you, Avner for joining us, for giving us a fabulous insight to you as the businessman, you as the spiritual guru. And, and thank you everyone for listening in to today's data movers podcast. Be sure to check us out on jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming data center, data movers episodes releasing every other Wednesday morning and other JSA podcast series. So go ahead and click around there. Yeah, I gotta keep the train moving and be sure to follow us on Twitter at JSCOTTO and Evan Kerstel and continue the discussion and chat there. And as always guys, happy networking.