Today signifies a new stage in the growth of the Kao Data brand. With our first data centre now fully operational and already home to a number of high performance computing, artificial intelligence and enterprise customers, our focus now shifts to accelerating our commercial partnerships throughout 2020, and developing the rest of our campus.
This new stage brings with it a new, fresh outlook and my more ‘eagle eyed’ industry peers and connections will have undoubtedly seen that we’ve today changed our corporate logo and branding. Welcome to the new look of Kao Data. Thanks to my entire team for the considerable amount of work that has gone on behind the scenes to make this happen.
Across my career I have always taken a keen interest in marketing and communications and while in some companies I know the ‘re-branding’ phase can be painful, arduous and long-winded, I was delighted at how straight-forward it was for our team to agree on Kao Data’s forward approach.
Like me, many of my colleagues have dedicated their entire careers to designing, building and operating high performance data centres and when we came together to discuss updating our corporate brand, we were unified in our ambition for the new look to represent the hyperscale-inspired architecture we’ve built at our campus, in the heart of the UK’s Innovation Corridor.
Data centres are, at their core, about infrastructure – reliable, resilient and secure infrastructure, but infrastructure nonetheless. Our new logo and branding reflect Kao Data’s iconic green exterior fins - highlighting the company’s 100% commitment to sustainable computing - and recognises a team which together have built a world class facility combining technical excellence and engineering innovation.
An essential element of our re-branding was to continue our association with the legacy provided by the late Sir Charles Kao. In the ultra-digitally connected era we now live in, it’s easy to forget how significant Sir Charles Kao and George Hockham’s discovery of fibre-optic cable technology was. Back in 1966, our campus was the home of this innovation, and it’s fitting – especially in the increasingly connected times right now – that our company continues to recognise Sir Charles Kao’s pioneering achievement.
That ‘spirit of innovation’ that Sir Charles Kao embodies and the opportunity to ‘challenge the norm’ is something we really cherish at Kao Data. We were the UK’s first colocation facility to provide refrigerant-free, indirect evaporative cooling, and the first data centre in the UK to be accredited as OCP Ready by the Open Compute Project. We also stand-alone as the only wholesale UK data centre to be backed by UK-only investors. This financial strength and assurance have enabled us to build-out our data centre and campus at industrial scale – perfect for HPC, AI and London’s financial grid computing.
Mark Boost, CEO at ServerChoice – a client and our provider of managed services in the data centre – recently summed up how innovation is at the core of everything we do: “We chose to work with Kao Data because they’re founded on innovation, and that matches our aspirations”, said Mark. “Legacy data centres can’t compare with the power infrastructure, cooling system, security and sheer scalability at Kao Data.”
As such, it is entirely fitting that our new logo and branding recognises Kao Data’s award-winning infrastructure and I’m excited to start this new stage in our growth with the expert team we have established at the campus.
In an industry that is so challenging for newcomers to establish a strong position, our team have come together with the same vision; to disrupt a rapidly growing market with new ideas, to foster a straight-forward, ‘easy-to-do-business with’ approach and to establish Kao Data as the most advanced data centre campus to serve London and the UK Innovation Corridor’s growing digital economies.
I’d like to close this post on behalf of my colleagues at Kao Data and wish all of our clients, partners, contractors and suppliers well during this time. It has been a challenging few months for our team and I’m exceptionally proud at how they’ve come together to seamlessly adapt to the unprecedented environment we find ourselves in. We remain very conscious however of the far tougher experiences other industries, friends, families and colleagues continue to face, and wish them all well. Please keep safe.
Paul Finch
Paul Finch is COO at Kao Data and has had a 30-year career designing, building and operating some of the world’s finest data centres.