Telehouse: global data centres with a customer-centric approach to support the digital future
The global proliferation of smartphones and cloud services has led to a rapid digital shift in the way we live and work.
Telehouse, a member of the KDDI Group and a global data center provider, is supporting this transformation.
Telehouse will showcase its services at MWC Barcelona 2024, the world’s largest mobile event, which will take place over four days from 26 February 2024.
We spoke to two Telehouse Europe executives Paul Lewis, Senior Vice President & Leader of Technical Services and Mark Pestridge Executive Vice President & General Manager, about the value of their business.
Global data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia
What is Telehouse?
Pestridge: Telehouse is a global data center provider established in 1989 as a member of the KDDI Group. As of January 2024, we have over 45 data centers in three regions (North America, Europe, and Asia)/10+ countries, offering data center services such as colocation and interconnection (connectivity services) and host leading ‘Internet Exchanges (IX)’.
Could you give us some specifics about colocation services and IX?
Lewis: Colocation is a service that provides support for the maintenance and operation of customers’ IT resources in a secure and reliable data center. Telehouse provides high-quality colocation services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Pestridge: An IX is a service that enables the interconnection and exchange of Internet traffic. This service brings together interconnection points for major telecommunications carriers, internet service providers (ISPs), cloud service providers, content providers and data center providers, enabling the efficient exchange of traffic between operators.
In London, our London Docklands data center campus was the first and primary home of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) which contributed to the growth of our campus into one of the world’s leading internet hubs. Telehouse also owns the New York International Internet Exchange (NYIIX) which has excellent international connectivity.
The value of data centers is difficult for ordinary people to see. Can you explain their value to society?
Pestridge: Most people are unaware of the existence of data centers. However, data centers are the foundation of the digital society. People may be completely unaware of the number of times they come into contact with a data center during the course of their day as various cloud services as well as movie streaming services, online shopping services and even smartphone apps used in our daily lives are hosted by data centers. In other words, data centers are an essential infrastructure for today’s digital society.
How about the Telehouse business status？
Pestridge: As of January 2024, Telehouse services are utilized by more than 3,000 customers globally. These customers are diverse in business scale and organization size. From some of the world’s largest multinationals to small and medium-sized enterprises doing business locally. Our customers also come from a wide range of industries, such as mobile operators, cloud service providers and content platforms, as well as financial institutions, manufacturers, and retailers.
How is the data center market growing?
Lewis: The market is growing at a significant rate. In Europe, for example, demand for colocation services has been growing for many years.
More recently, the increase of remote working in the wake of COVID-19 has accelerated the growth in demand for data centers. In the future, the demand for data centers is expected to continue to grow, driven by the development and demand for applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), AI and 5G.
Pestridge: In Europe in particular, data center demand in major cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt and Dublin is growing at an unprecedented rate, with a forecasted year-on-year growth of 17% in 2023.
This trend is expected to continue over the next three to five years and beyond. In addition, data center demand is also growing rapidly in second-tier markets in Europe such as Marseille, where Telehouse has recently expanded its presence, and Madrid, and Lisbon, driven by the need for high-performance computing and IoT.
Customer centricity is at the heart of everything we do
The data center market is highly competitive. What are Telehouse’s strengths compared to its competitors?
Pestridge: We understand that one size does not fit all. Every customer is unique, we listen to our customers and customize our services to meet their requirements and make it easy for them to do business with us. We are trusted by our customers, and this is a result of the consistent pursuit of operational excellence, security, and resilience in our data centers. Our core services are colocation and connectivity however, we try to understand what our customers use our services for, their requirements at each stage of their the journey with us and how we can continue to meet their needs as they continue to evolve and grow.
There is another factor that has made Telehouse’s services popular with a large number of customers.
Could you be more specific on the point?
Lewis: Customers’ needs for data center services vary depending on their business scale, business nature, and organizational size. Telehouse aims at working with its customers to understand their operational goals and to contribute to the achievement of these goals by delivering high-quality, reliable, scalable data center services that meet their business needs.
Customers’ needs for data centers also change over time, don’t they?
Pestridge: Of course, they change. That’s why we regularly monitor and use feedback from customer research such as our annual NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey to understand the challenges our customers face and the goals they want to achieve, and improvements we need to make to services to ensure that they continuously meet our customers’ needs.
Can you provide an example of how Telehouse has delivered this customer-centric approach?
Pestridge: Last year we launched a customer project to understand the challenges and needs of customers at various stages of their interactions with Telehouse. We undertook research with a range of customers of and we are using the findings of the research to evolve and improve our customer experience.
Lewis: During the COVID-19 epidemic, here in London, Telehouse had to respond quickly to the surge in internet usage and the need for our customers to maintain their systems at our data center campus, while also ensuring the safety of our staff. We put in place policies and practices that were aligned with government guidelines, to ensure the safety of our staff and visitors to our campus and kept in close contact with our customers to ensure that we maintained a balance between the stability of our operations and ensuring that we responded to our customers specific needs.
As part of this initiative, we also continued to offer our Remote Hands Service, providing our customers with the option to utilize our own highly skilled engineering staff to undertake IT services in their racks located at our data centers and therefore reduce the need for their own engineers to visit our campus. This measure helped minimize exposure to the virus and the risk of infection for both the customers and Telehouse staff.
Focus on a sustainable future
In recent years, interest in ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) has been growing worldwide. How does Telehouse address this topic?
Lewis: Businesses are facing increased pressures to provide clearer evidence of their environmental and ethical practices. At Telehouse, ESG is at the forefront of our decision making, partnerships and our people. We constantly strive to adopt the highest standards to drive energy efficiency, foster green procurement, ensure effective resource management, and reduce our carbon footprint. We operate our London Docklands data center campus using energy sourced from renewable sources. In Paris, the heat generated from one of our data centers is being used for nearby district heating, and we have plans to expand this initiative to Frankfurt and London. In addition, the CEO of Telehouse Germany is a board member of the Climate Neutral Data Center pact in Europe.
We are a responsible corporate member of the communities in which we operate, and we strive to create a positive impact on our own people and the people living in our communities by providing work experience as the local employment schemes and supporting charitable activities.
Telehouse will be present at MWC Barcelona 2024, one of the world’s largest mobile networking events. What results do you expect to achieve?
Pestridge:. There are almost 90,000 forecasted to attend MWC Barcelona 2024 and the event presents a great opportunity for us to understand some of the key developments and drivers that are going to shape our industry moving forward and the applications that are going to drive data center growth across the world in the next 3 to 5 years. It is a great opportunity for us to meet with our existing and new customers to discuss how we can collaborate with them to achieve their goals and overcome their challenges. There is an opportunity for us to forge new partnerships with key players in areas such as liquid cooling or immersion cooling technology (*).
Lewis: At MWC Barcelona 2024, we want to showcase what can be achieved by combining KDDI’s technological capabilities in mobile communications and Telehouse’s global data centers to create a digital society where everyone can realize their dreams. We both play a key role in ensuring the successful delivery of lifestyle services to end users.
* Immersion cooling technology: a technology that efficiently cools servers and storage by immersing them in a dedicated liquid. KDDI has developed its own immersion cooling technology with partner companies and has conducted a series of demonstration tests towards its commercialization.
Relevant Links
Telehouse Canada – telehouse.ca
Telehouse Europe – https://www.telehouse.net/
KDDI’s special website for ‘MWC Barcelona 2024’