Basefarm’s new recruit shares insights on EU data centre industry

Digital transformation has seen European managed service provider Basefarm growing in leaps and bounds in recent years.

Founded in Norway in 2000, Basefarm is now operating 11 data centers across four different countries.

Earlier this year Petter Tømmeraas was appointed as senior vice president for Basefarm's data center business after working as chief sales officer at Green Mountain. We asked Tømmeraas for his opinions regarding the data center industry in Europe.

"Data is the backbone of the digital revolution and we're seeing a big change in the data center market because of it. Organisations are moving away from managing their own IT operations and infrastructure, but not only that, they are actively seeking IT partnerships to get access to expertise in areas like cloud services, big data analytics, AI and machine learning," says Tømmeraas.

"Most customers need partners they can trust with their mission critical IT, someone who will store their data, but also help them innovate and develop new services and who truly understands how to manage these effectively and securely in a hybrid cloud environment. We talk about it as a "from idea to cable approach", a one-stop-shop of innovation, development and management.

Tømmeraas says it certainly makes for exciting times with all the digital transformation and innovative technologies that are emerging, and they're seeing interest from a lot of players at the moment.

"The hyperscalers and other global players are looking for good partners to set up edge data centers, service providers are increasingly moving into large colocation facilities, and the enterprise market has mostly stopped building their own data centers at a high cost to focus more on their own solutions and services instead of having to focus on power, cooling and physical security," says Tømmeraas.

"We rarely see customers looking for only colocation today, although we are of course happy to provide that service, and for many it's only a matter of time before they also start using managed cloud services.

In terms of the company's current projects and what's on the cards next, Tømmeraas is confident they're going in the right direction.

"Our newest facility, OSL5, is a 6,000 sqm data center located in Oslo, Norway. Like our other data centers it is situated in a hub spot for big private and public enterprises. The Norwegian government recently announced a new strategy for the data center industry including tax benefits, investment programmes etc, so we are definitely in the right place," says Tømmeraas.

"Our business is set to grow over the next years as data becomes even more important, and we are likely to see automation and machine learning coming together in the data center space to create self-repairing and, in time, maybe even totally autonomous data centers.