Andy Davis:
Welcome to the inside data center podcast. I’m Andy Davis. And in this podcast, I will interview the people working in the data center sector and tell their stories. If you are working in the DC sector or you are looking to work in the sector, then this is a podcast for you. Welcome to the inside data center podcast. Today I’m joined by Patrick Quirk chief technology officer at north list data technologies. Good afternoon for me and good morning for you, Patrick.
Patrick Quirk:
How are you doing today, Andy?
Andy Davis:
I’m good. Thank you. Happy new year, happy new year to everyone listening as well. First, the first recorded episode of 2022, before we start, obviously it’s great to have you on as I said, but yeah, when we were talking previously, I’ve had Jim on before from north list and the technology you’re doing is always fascinating to the listeners. So, it’s great to get you on to kind of learn more about that aspect of, of the business get a bit of an update of where you are at today before we start, you just want to give a quick introduction of, of who you are and, and what you do at Nautilus?
Patrick Quirk:
Sure thing. I’m the Chief Technology Officer for Nautilus and have been in the data center industry directly for about the last 10 to 12 years. Started off my career as an electrical engineer by training. I’ve got a master’s in signal processing and kind of spent the first, eight to 10 years of my career in aircraft communications and then moved into a kind of working my way up the access chain. So started off doing modem design, ISDN all kinds of fun stuff like that. Got into DSL. And then in the early two thousand joined an Irish-based startup doing a gigabit ethernet semiconductor company called Mesana. And we ended up getting acquired a couple of times by gear systems then LSI logic kind of the typical cycle you go through on the semiconductor space.
So I spent 10 years doing that and left in 2009, I guess, did some consulting and did another startup and packaged it up back in 2011 and joined Emerson electric as part of the Avocent division spent a couple of years working primarily in the server management side of things. And then my team picked up all of the critical infrastructure management for the Liebert equipment, both UPS’s cooling units et cetera, et cetera. And then spent several years working in that space. Also picked up a group. We called the converged systems group, which was essentially doing modular IT deployments. So from a partial rack level, all the way up to an integrated row where we had integrated cooling power, backup, fire suppression, all kinds of things like that.
So essentially many data centers would go into an existing space. And then we got acquired by platinum equity back in 2016 and became Vertiv. So spent the next four years kind of refining what the message was and, and working through you know, how to, how to change from the kind of the big industrial side to being a little bit more agile. And you know, it was great, great to be a part of that growth story as well. So joined, I joined Nautilus right a year ago. Having been in the equipment side, the product side for years it was kind of interesting, to look at it from the other side of the industry, if you will, from the delivery side.
And just as we spent years trying to squeeze 1 or 2% of improvement out per year and to come across technology and a company to it was going to make a 30 to 50% change in a single step. I mean, it’s pretty rare that you get the opportunity to do that in your career. And so it was you know, kind of a no-brainer for me to jump in and join it and do everything I could to, to help really scale it out as the main reason that that was brought up. So,
Andy Davis:
Yeah, I was going to ask you about sort of why you join Nautilus as well because from the outside looking in, I think to a lot of people, the technology is groundbreaking and amazing. And, and as you say, I guess for someone like yourself from your background, it’s, it’s like the ideal opportunity to be involved with something that is going to change the sector or a number of sectors no doubt in the future.
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah, absolutely. The other thing is, is that I am much more of a, of a doer and an operator than the kind of ahead in the sky kind of technologist, if you will. And to see a company go in and, and address it – not just greenwashing things, but going in and improving the efficiency that dramatically at a scale that really hadn’t been seen other than in the hyperscale data centers. And being able to bring that down to a level where it’s accessible for any enterprise that wants to, to utilize you know, and, and get, get the benefits of having a, a much more efficient, much more environmentally friendly solution from a data center perspective.
Andy Davis:
Yeah, definitely. And we’ll obviously touch more on, on Nautilus shortly, but one question I always like to ask for people like yourself, who’ve had a successful career in the industry is just kind of what advice you’d give to someone that’s looking to follow a similar path or someone that’s looking to progress their career. And, and everyone always laughs at us saying, don’t say don’t do it because <laugh>
Patrick Quirk:
That’s the obvious answer. Right. Exactly.
Andy Davis:
That’s what we all expect. But yeah, but is there anything any words of wisdom you’d share with people looking to progress their career in the sector?
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah, so, I mean, I’ve always been a firm believer in design yourself out of a job so that you get a lot of variety and you know, having the ability to go deep on the technical side is, is obviously from a being a CTO, you got to have, have that ability, but having the breadth of industry knowledge and being able to work both on the finance side, as well as you know, understanding the technology pieces and, and because ultimately a lot of these decisions are coming down to the CFO. So if, if you can’t as a, as a technologist, if you don’t understand the market and the business and the customers you’re not going to be successful. So my recommendation would be getting, get broad experience, right? Spend as much time with the marketing people, the salespeople, and with customers as possible. Use your technology foundation as a base, but get that breadth of experience, because that really is ultimately where the decisions are made and, and where you know, you can have the most impact.
Andy Davis:
Definitely. And that is quite common advice as well. I think that breadth of experience is really important. I think it’s not appreciated as much as it should be. I don’t think in people’s careers where you do actually spend time to learn what other people are doing and try and take their knowledge with you as you go on your journey.
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah. I mean, think about it in athletics, right? They’re, you know the best athletes are usually very good at multiple sports and they do a lot of different things. It’s the same thing you’re training your mind, you’re training your skillset to be able to work with all kinds of people and you know, really that understanding of the customer and the market is ultimately the most important thing.
Andy Davis:
Yeah, definitely. And make good friends with the CFO.
Patrick Quirk:
<Laugh> Absolutely.
Andy Davis:
That’s a great bit of advice for anybody on any level <laugh>. Obviously, that brings us on to Nautilus. I love the company and I love what you’re doing and I regularly read a lot of about it, but keen to really get into a bit more detail about what you’re doing and, and how it is changing the industry to sort paint a better picture for the listeners. But do you want to just give a bit of a picture of where Nautilus is today? Cause I think it was around probably nine months ago when I spoke to Jim. So, I know a lot’s happened nine months, a long time in Nautilus. Where are we up to right now?
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah. So great timing for this for that question because we actually just finished commissioning the next five megawatts of our data center out in Stockton. Just right before the end of the year. Our Stockton facility is fully up and running. It’s a seven-megawatt facility. You know, we’ve been onboarding customers now. It was originally the first portion that was commissioned back a year ago in December 2020. We’re now at full seven megawatts we’ve been onboarding customers and you know, it’s been the uptake and the interest from the industry coming out of COVID, obviously, a lot of people couldn’t come and see it, but as, as things were starting to open back up just the general interest from the, from the community in general and from customers has been fantastic.
You know, we committed to getting the rest of it the rest of that one commissioned by the end of the year. And, and we hit that pretty much right on with about a week to spare. So <laugh> everyone got to go home for Christmas, which is always nice. And then we’ve got several other sites under development. We’ve announced a location in Northern Maine in Millinocket at the site of a former paper mill. You know, that one to me is super exciting because it’s not only are we refurbishing a brownfield site but you know, this is a town whose primary employer packed up and left. It’s happening everywhere, right? I mean, you can go into pretty much any part of the country and see where these former industrial towns have just been hollowed out and there’s not much there.
So being able to take a brownfield site and, and refurbish it and create jobs, high paying, well-paying jobs for the community, that’s a fantastic thing. And then on top of that you know, it will be the greenest data center in the world. So a 100% renewable power with a hydro plant sitting right next to us. You know, we’ve got the ability to expand it up to something in the range of 60 megawatts. If we wanted to we’ll start out smaller than that, obviously. But you know, having that zero-water consumption and a hundred percent green power sitting right next to it us it’s going to be a tremendous thing. And then we’re sitting about a hundred feet below the waterway, so we don’t even need to pump the water that we use for cooling.
We get to use gravity to feed it, which helps make our solution that much more efficient. So that one, we’re all super excited about getting breaking ground on that you know, hopefully here in the next few months. And that one like I said, super excited about that, that location, it’s a beautiful site. And I think it would be a beautiful data center once we get it done. The second one that we’ve really been ramping up, we had committed to building a data center in Limerick, Ireland back again, kind of pre-pandemic and things you know, slowed quite a bit there during it. But over the last several months we’ve been kind of ramping up our efforts there. And you know, Ireland is an interesting place and they’re not the, not the only country that’s going through this, but a lot of places are looking and they’re evaluating, should we put a moratorium on data centers because they’re consuming so much power and it’s causing ripple effects in the distribution networks when you’ve got that much demand. Suddenly being added and they don’t have the distribution, or the generation capacity, and Ireland has done a great job of committing to moving to you know, essentially a carbon-free energy generation scheme.
But it’s going to take years to get there. Now, they’ve got a lot of great natural resources as far as obviously wind. They get a fair amount of that. And they’ve done a great job, of expanding their wind capacity and a few other things, but if at the rate the data centers were being built, it was going to kind of take them off that path. So the regulator there has come up with a reasonable set of criteria that kind of balances the interests of the industry with the needs of Ireland overall from an energy perspective. As we get started into this development you know, one of the key things that we wanted to be able to do was to look forward to what Ireland was trying to do. They didn’t quite come out and say data centers must bring their own power, but they effectively said data centers have to bring their own power and work with the grid and make sure they’re being good stewards and actually can help support incidences.
So we’ve actually modified our designs so that we’ve got dispatchable capacity from our generators and that if the service operator requests, we can go offline and, and fully generate without having to pull from the grid. We’ve even built in the ability to support the grid during brownout times or low power times where we have access capacity beyond what the data center needs are. The other thing that Ireland put in place as they want, they want data centers in locations that are not power constrained. So Limerick is one of the least power-constrained regions in all of Ireland and you know, kind of moving data centers out of that Dublin core out into the Midwest and the West of Ireland is something that the Irish government’s interested in and we’re more than happy to help start that movement.
So again, super excited about that one, that’ll be another water-based one. So, it won’t be on the, won’t be a land-based like the one in Maine. It’s an opportunity for us to kind of get our second, third generation of you know, of design in place. And, and it’ll be more efficient even than the one that we have in Stockton. So really looking forward to that, and both of those projects should be getting kicked off here over the next couple of months, and hopefully, we’ll be able to commission in early 2023.
Andy Davis:
As you can hear, they’ve been very busy <laugh> yeah. A lot going on. I know I wanted to touch on a couple of points you’ve raised there. Maine obviously I think the, the importance of that relationship with the community is something that I think we’re going to see a lot more of. And I’m really glad that you highlighted that point. And I think we should pick up on it as well because data centers get a lot of negative press. We know that, and we’re always trying to kind of compete with it and get the positive stories out there as well. But the impact, the account that these facilities can have on the communities as well, doesn’t, shouldn’t be underestimated, I don’t think. And I think it’s great that companies like yours and others are going to these locations where there is that kind of, there is that talent available, and those people are there that want work. But like you say, they’ve been impacted by changes in industry, basically something totally out of their control. So I think well done for, for picking that location.
Patrick Quirk:
Thanks.
Andy Davis:
And with and with Limerick like you say, sustainability is obviously a massive question topic this year, and it was last year, but have you seen that more operators are now coming to you to kind of partner with you because of the problems that you outlined regarding Limerick as an example?
Patrick Quirk:
Yes. So what everyone’s, and, and rightly so, everyone’s mostly focused on power efficiency, right? Because that’s the single place where you can have the most impact. But you know, you look at the large hyperscalers pretty much every single one of them has you know, made a commitment to be carbon neutral or carbon positive you know, within the next 10 to 15 years that kind of worse case and a lot of that they’re doing through, through carbon credits and, and things of that nature or buying up capacity at a wind farm or so essentially trading off. But you know, that doesn’t guarantee that the electrons that they’re actually consuming come from that wind farm or come from whatever the renewable source is. That part of it, there’s, I think there’s, there’s a shift in the industry that we’re feeling that people are wanting to get more real about the about where the power is coming from and tying that in with the efficiency side and, and that that to me is a great thing.
But then on top of that, you know this cropped up, I think it was in it was that this was a, a pretty big issue here fairly recently with the amount of drinking water that’s being consumed by some data centers. So when you do evaporative cooling you’ve got to bring in essentially drinking water from the public water system. They have to chemically treat it you get evaporation up into the air and then blow down with the chemicals that they have to go back into the wastewater treatment side. And there’s, there’s power cost associated with that. Then, the bigger one is kind of the human cost of you’re taking drinking water away from the population. In places that are water challenged, Phoenix is a great example of that, but there are other places even globally, even people where there are large population centers along, you know oceans and bays and things of that nature a lot of those do tend to be fairly dry climates.
California’s a perfect example of that. The fact that we’re able to you know, kind of do that bulk cooling through just natural naturally cool water, as opposed to having to have chemicals that are you know, added into the water and then have to feedback in you know, that that’s starting to become a, a pretty big issue with a lot of customers. I think the industry as a whole is kind of waking up to the fact that, that if we don’t take on this mantle ourselves and solve it ourselves, there will be government regulation. All you have to do is, is look at the moratoria that have been passed. You know, Singapore is deep into their second year, of no new data center moratorium. So that’s Ireland has just struggled with it themselves and just kind of come with a, come out with a nice balanced result, but there’s no guarantee that’s going to be the case everywhere. And so I think more and more you’re seeing and again, rightly so the customers are looking at this and saying, what’s the impact that we’re having and how can we minimize that impact both from a power efficiency perspective, but also from other natural resource perspective.
Andy Davis:
Yeah. And I think what, what I’ve seen over the last 12 months as well is, is a lot of the, the hyperscale projects are, they’re not being approved as quickly as they were previously. There’s a lot of back and forth. Isn’t there, there’s a, it’s a major one in the Netherlands at the moment that gets approved every week and then gets rejected every week. It’s, it’s just going on and on. And I think a lot of that is around what you’ve outlined really, it’s about the industry, actually coming up with the solution to say, look, we can overcome all these obstacles, and this is how we’re going to do it. And it’s definitely getting better at it, but hopefully, over the course of 2022, we’ll see, we’ll see more of that basically.
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah. And, and there are some great technologies out there – amazing technology. We’re not the only ones who’ve got good technology they’re bringing to the table. You know, there’s a lot of smart people in this industry. And a lot of people that understand what the fundamental problems are. So I think you’re seeing a lot of experimentation. I mean, obviously the hyperscalers over the last 10 to 15 years, they’ve been the guys who kind of leaned forward the most into this stuff. But you know, you’re, you’re seeing it more and more from kind of the ground level. And instead of having to be deployments that are at that massive scale, you’re seeing people apply technologies at much smaller scales where it’s even edge deployments that are much more efficient than people really wouldn’t have worried about how efficient it was five or 10 years ago. Now they’re looking at edge data centers and making sure that they’re just as efficient as the hyperscale ones right. To me, it’s all positive.
Andy Davis:
Yeah. I was going to say that about edge. I think we, you’ve seen a lot of technology kind of being played around within the edge sector aren’t you? And they’re trying to come up with those solutions and there’s no doubt that some of those solutions will also impact the colo or the hyperscale facilities as well.
Patrick Quirk:
Yep. Yeah. I mean, even just like battery technologies, there’s a lot of movement towards solid-state batteries. You know, we’re probably five, 10 years away from that from being mainstream, but at that point, the power densities get much better. You don’t have quite the heating problems and so all those things help contribute to improving the all efficiency of what is now estimates are what between three and six percent of all global power is, is for data centers now. You know, that’s, that’s, non-trivial so we’ve all got to look at that and make sure that that three to 6% kind of stays in that range and doesn’t grow to be 13 to 16%.
Andy Davis:
Definitely another point I wanted pick up on as well as sort of regarding recent news is the fact that obviously you recently announced your, your facilities OCP ready, and I know that’s quite a big achievement for yourself. So, do you want to just explain kind of why that’s important?
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah. So we were kind of looking at that. Back when I was at Emerson we actually have participated in some of the early OCP activities around the open rack project. And you know, my group worked on a DC power shelf. And so I was involved in a lot of the early OCP activities. We started looking at it, and we were kind of surprised to see that there were no OCP ready colocation data centers in all of North America. And we were kind of gobsmacked by that, right? That was a kind of shocking revelation. So we said, well, why not us? You know, we already had a customer in our data center in Stockton that was using an OCP rack.
And so we kind of look at the criteria and said, Hey, this, this is something that we can go off and do to help the community have a location that they can take their OCP based equipment and have a data center that a colocation data center that’s ready for them just to roll it in rack and roll it and, and get it started. It kind of goes back to that idea of there are a lot of great technologies out there. We’re not the only ones we want to embrace the community and, and what people are doing from an innovation perspective. And open compute has done now for pushing 10 years has done a great job of, of democratizing solutions.
It used to be that everyone was kind of locked into you know, whatever the standard solution was that you could get from a bunch of vendors, and you had to piece it together, yourself, people started looking at how do I do pre-integration of it equipment pretesting of applications. And then the platforms like OCP have provided, have really enabled that democratization so that everybody gets the advantages of, of what the hyperscalers and the large-scale enterprises are able to do, and you can do it on a single rack basis or smaller. And so then being able to know that you’ve got a data center that you can walk into, that’s completely compatible with all the existing specifications. I mean, that’s just another notch in the ability of democratizing solutions for everybody.
Andy Davis:
Right. Exactly. And well, I’m for doing it. Like you say, it’s surprising that there wasn’t one in north America. Yeah. We were shocked <laugh>
Patrick Quirk:
Absolutely.
Andy Davis:
You, you will never not be the first so well done. Before we close out, I just wanted to touch on the future. So kind of what’s next for Nautilus. Is there any, anything you can say what what’s coming up, what are the plans for, what are the plans for 2022?
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah, there’s a, there’s obviously a lot of stuff I can’t say…
Andy Davis:
Yes, <laugh>
Patrick Quirk:
We’ve got several sites in the pipeline. You know, we’ve really tried to take 2021 to finalize our technology pieces, get a next-generation design in place. You know, the Stockton data center know while incredibly innovative and got some great technology in it, there were things that could be improved. There are always things that can be improved. And what we tried to do is utilize innovation to kind of move the ball forward and you know, myself and the president of the company, Rob Pfleging, both come from a modular data center background. We were both part of the solutions business at Emerson and Vertiv and you know, that that team has done a great job of, of building solutions that are modularized and to where you’re building things in the factory reduce the amount of shipping containers.
You have to use reduce the amount of total metal that you have to put into a solution. And so, we really tried to go in and, and take our core design and make it to where more scalable for the future so that we can start accelerating the number of data centers that we’re building. And quite honestly we want to try and get this technology rolled out as many places as we possibly can. So we’ve got some announcements coming up on that and the next two data centers we use are our third-generation platform. We’ll have some announcements about that over the year, over this coming year. And in addition to that like I said, we’ll will start spreading out a little bit more globally.
One of the areas that we’ve kind of focused on is where. For example, the data center in Limerick and in Maine are both sitting a few hundred kilometers of the shortest trans-Atlantic fiber path. That location was chosen for a reason, right? We wanted to have the furthest east colocation data center in North America and the furthest west one in, in Europe. We’re going to kind of continue that theme around connectivity and, and bridging you know, not only just bridging continents, but bridging within intracontinental as we start our expansion, you know beyond 2022 and 2023. The other thing is that we’re trying to work with as many possible partners as we can. We announced this past year, the partnership with Bechtel enterprises. So they’re going to be ramping up their support of us in the build-out of our data centers to really, to help us scale. And I think we’ll see you know, kind of the benefits of that relationship really start to blossom in 2022 as well.
Andy Davis:
Definitely. And I guess where you sit within the industry of your technology, you are, you are open to those partnerships, aren’t you, you’re kind of primarily positioned to partner with a number of companies moving different sort of different levels of the industry.
Patrick Quirk:
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we are kind of unique because you typically don’t see a colocation provider that’s bringing their own core technology as well, right? They’re really kind of tending to come more from the real estate side and they’re partnering with you know, the existing product companies, but we’re kind of a hybrid between the two and obviously, we’re partnering with a lot of the existing industry players as well. But you know, we bring our own core technology to it and can deliver that solution all the way to the end customer. So we are in kind of a unique position.
Andy Davis:
Exactly. So if anyone listening is, is interested reach out to Patrick or me or anyone, we’ll put you in touch.
Patrick Quirk:
Ha, 1-800-NAUTILUS, right. <Laugh>,
Andy Davis:
That’s it exactly. We’ll get in touch before we close out. Just a couple of questions I wanted to finish chat with. First one is kind of just regarding the data center market as a whole, what have you got any, I’m not a big fan of predictions, but any forecast for 2022, how do you see the industry evolving this year? Any big changes or what what’s going to happen?
Patrick Quirk:
You know, I think the, the single biggest thing is just been the impact of extending of supply chains. You know, the demand growth has not changed. You know, we’re seeing still tremendous demand. But you know, the, the supply chain challenges have really hit the industry. You know, there’s a lot of equipment that three years ago I wouldn’t have even blinked twice at 18 to 20 weeks. That’s now 60 weeks. You know, so I think that 2022 is going to be a challenging year, just from a deployment perspective, just because of the supply chain side of things. You’re seeing a lot of people, there’s a lot of regionalization going on, which ultimately is a good thing because it builds resilience into the supply chain side of stuff.
And the vendor community has, has really stepped up and responded. Every supplier that we work with you know, know the Vertiv’s, the Schneiders, the Eatons, everybody else in the industry, Caterpillar – they’re all doing everything that they can to try and make sure that they’re not the long lead guy and that they’re not the one that, that creates that disruption. So, I think that 2022 is going to be a challenging year, just from a build perspective because of that. I think as we come out of 2022, you know having been on the semiconductor side that tends to be on the kind of the leading edge of these, these supply chain you know, not quite whipsaw effects, but they tend to extend first.
So, I keep tight tabs on what’s going on the semiconductor side, there has been a lot of capacity work that’s been done there. And you’re starting to see some of the lead times coming down in that space. So that kind of portends, I think, well for late 2022, 2023 for this to, to start easing up a little bit. So then what, what that then says to me is that 23 is really shaping up to be just a blockbuster buildout year. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of,
Andy Davis:
I think every year, this, this point or the end of the previous year, there’s a similar conversation around, there’s a different reason, but there’s always the year after going to be busy. You know, this, I think it obviously it’s really busy all the time, but I think it just demonstrates the growth because we know 2022 is going to be really busy, but then when you look at it and you analyze it, like you just have you think, but then 2023 <laugh> is going to be even busier.
Patrick Quirk:
Yep. Yep, absolutely. So everything that got deferred through the pandemic is going to start coming online during 2022. And I think that’s when we’ll be back <laugh> back in another rapid ramp phase here late 2022 through 2023. So I think generally for the industry, it’s, it’s a, it’s a great time. You know, and as we kind of started off with the best aspect of it is we’re all building more responsibly. You know, we’re all doing things to try and improve efficiency, to try and improve our impact on the environment. And to, to really make sure that as we do ramp up that build-out, we’re doing it in a sustainable way, as much as possible.
Andy Davis:
And great point to make as well, because I think historically that’s not been the case going back quite a few years, but definitely, now I’ve said all the way through this discussion, really it is, if not the number one priority it’s, it’s in the top three of, I think everybody at the moment,
Patrick Quirk:
Definitely 1A or 1B <laugh>
Andy Davis:
Exactly. Final question before we close out, there’s just one question. I ask everyone on the podcast just to get their views, but if you could give one piece of advice to anyone looking to work in the data center sector, what would it be?
Patrick Quirk:
Another great question. So yeah, you know this, this is something that, that we’ve talked about internally in the industry for years is that there really aren’t great training programs. So when we located you know, when Nautilus located in, in Stockton you know, one of the things that we were able to do was there were people who were working in the data center space in the San Jose area that were commuting an hour and a half, both ways every day. And so we were able to get a couple of core people there and then you know, found people that were in different industries and trained them ourselves. I think you’re seeing more and more of that.
There are a number of organizations that are, that are doing a really good job. You know, Salute is a great company that has gone in and, you know, really transformed the operational portion of the data center space. And they’re bringing people in that have pretty diverse backgrounds and training them up on what it takes. And there are other organizations doing similar things. My first advice would be you know it never hurts to know how to work a computer, right? <Laugh> So if you’re a gamer, you’re a hacker, whatever you’ve got, you have the right DNA and you know, pretty much anything else you’re going to get into a company and they’re going to want to train you on the way that they do operations.
The main thing is if you want to be in this industry if you look up data center engineer or data center training there just isn’t anything. And that’s another area that, that we as an industry have got to get better on because there’s a lot of brain drain going on. There’s going to be a lot of people that move out of the industry in the next five to 10 years, right. At this point that’s where we have this incredible growth. So, the opportunities are there you know, find somebody in your network that is working in the data center space and ask them how they got into it. You know, I didn’t originally start off in the data center space.
I was more on telecommunications and data communications, which obviously are kind of critical to the information side of what goes on in the data center. But as far as data center construction and build that wasn’t really my background, but you pick up what you have to, and you apply this the same engineering lessons that you would have anywhere else. So that I’ll go all the way back, kind of the, one of the first things that we said is that and diversity of experience and the more you can go in and, and build a, a broad base of both technical and you know, managerial experience. It’ll translate. So whichever path you find your way in. Don’t expect there to be one way to get into this industry, right?
There’s a lot of different paths and we’re looking for talented people. So just because you’re in networking or you’re in telecom space or, you know shoot, we, we’ve almost a third of our employee base are former military you know, enlisted people. So we’ve been able to, to take guys that were, were trained in a lot of different areas and bring them in and within about six months have them fully up on operational. So there’s a lot of different paths you can come in on. It’s a great growing space, the wages are fantastic. The hours are not necessarily so great <laugh> but you know, you get to be part of something that’s a nice growth industry and pretty exciting.
Andy Davis:
Yeah, no great advice. And you know, I totally agree on the point you’ve covered there. Training is a massive one. I think it’s on high, on most companies radar now, which is great. Again, I think it was see a lot of change over that in 2022. Definitely. and I think with the diversity of experiences, again, is something that organizations probably 18 months ago would not consider. You know, we want people with five years data center experience, et cetera, et cetera, which was a totally the wrong approach. Now they’re very much looking for people with skill was an experience from outside the industry to bring it into the industry because it is like you say, there’s a, there’s a core of core workforce. That’s been in it a long time. And we now need to kind of fill in around the edges with some, some new ideas basically.
Patrick Quirk:
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.
Andy Davis:
Hey advice anyway, I’ve love, I love chat you today. Good to learn more about north, keep up the great work as I, I know you will, don’t work too many hours <laugh> hopefully. Yeah. And I’m sure you’re happy for anyone to reach out to you if they want to learn more about your technology or, or discuss anything with you regarding the industry.
Patrick Quirk:
Yep, absolutely.
Andy Davis:
We’ll show you details when we release it, but thanks again for your time and we’ll catch up again soon.
Patrick Quirk:
All right. Appreciate it, Andy. Have a good one.
Andy Davis:
Cheer Patrick, take care. Take care. Bye.
