A brilliant tomorrow: Jerome Evans

How quickly things move in the intrepid worlds of business and technology. These days, IT infrastructure is as ubiquitous as the water coolers of yesteryear. Every credible business has this backbone in place; it’s now a matter of how strong it is.

For those companies in charge of providing this framework, the race to stay ahead of the pack and differentiate is more fierce than ever. There are so many options and solutions available that standing out is the first major challenge for many a data service center provider.

When Jerome Evans decided to capitalize on his early success as a provider of servers for esports, the result was firstcolo, a data center that’s grown into one of Germany’s industry leaders. Even in those early days, the factors that have come to act as the company’s points of difference were the pillars of its creation.

"Our key differentiators are our relentless focus on customer satisfaction and operational excellence with the highest possible uptime for our customers combined with cutting-edge technology," Evans tells The CEO Magazine.

"We deliver customized, high-performance colocation and cloud services while maintaining the responsiveness and adaptability of a lean organization."

Efficiency drives scalable solutions

It’s an approach that’s as practical as it reads. Untroubled by the bells and whistles that so often act as a smokescreen for a less-than-optimal service, firstcolo prioritizes efficiency.

"That’s what enables us to deliver our scalable services to customers at very short notice and how we’re able to meet today’s customer needs in the rapidly evolving data center and cloud market," Evans explains.

The agility firstcolo has become renowned for can trace its origins to Evans’ esports beginnings. In the early 2000s, he was providing servers for professional gamers – a field that won’t accept anything less than the best. Success with this discerning crowd gave him the confidence to go ahead with firstcolo in 2006.

"Many of our employees have spent a large part of their careers here," he says. "Our success story wouldn’t have been possible without our employees, and it’s both a great pleasure and a source of pride to be able to witness their continuous personal development as the company has grown."

And grown it has. Through canny investments and considered technological choices, firstcolo has kept its data centers at the bleeding edge of the industry.

"An increasing number of our customers are using our hybrid cloud services," Evans reveals.

Through a robust hybrid architecture, clients can easily shift workloads between the company’s cloud and colocation environments based on performance, compliance or cost requirements.

"This means specific workloads are operated on our customers’ on-premise hardware, while cloud solutions work in parallel to ensure maximum scalability of specific applications," he explains.

According to Evans, this combination of technologies has become more complex as customer requirements have matured, leading to the development of bespoke, in-house solutions.

"There are customers who use multiple cloud services in parallel in different regions in addition to regular colocation services," he says.

"With firstkube, we’ve developed a solution that allows our customers to manage multiple cloud services within one platform. In other words, we try to reduce complexity in order to give our customers the best possible user experience."

Sustainability powers innovation

Sustainability must play a part in any modern technological initiative and so it is for firstcolo.

"It’s a core pillar of our new Frankfurt data center," Evans says. "We’re implementing cutting-edge cooling technologies with both air and liquid-cooled racks and optimizing energy usage through AI-driven monitoring. We’re also using 100 percent renewable energy for all our data centers."

The overarching goal in this field is to set an industry benchmark for eco-friendly operations at the site.

"We want to prove that high performance and environmental responsibility can – and should – coexist," he adds.

The Frankfurt site is the culmination of Evans’ vision for firstcolo’s potential. The Rhine-Main region was chosen due to it being the fastest-growing data center market in Europe combined with the world’s best connectivity.

"My vision is to become one of the most attractive employers in the German data center market in order to find enough new employees in this labor market," he says.

"And due to our dynamic growth, we offer talented employees great internal development opportunities."

Evans has made the 24-megawatt facility the first key cornerstone of several large-scale data centers to be built in the future.

"It’s certainly one of the most important projects in our recent history," he admits. "It was essential for us to meet the high demand not only from German enterprise customers but also international cloud providers."

The new facility allows firstcolo to offer these customers further competitive advantages, such as one of the most modern data centers in Germany.

"We will have market-leading power usage effectiveness values below 1.2, so if a customer’s infrastructure uses one megawatt of power, for example, the total usage of our data centers will be 1.2 megawatts," he says.

The business has also evolved into a one-stop shop for clients.

"Our customers can purchase managed services or hardware in addition to the core services they’ve booked," he explains.

"We also offer flexible financing/leasing models and individualized support, enabling our customers to scale their IT environments quickly and cost-effectively."

As the pace of technological evolution in the data center sector continues to accelerate, so too does the emphasis on sustainability and demand for emerging trends such as AI. Evans believes firstcolo is uniquely positioned to deliver all this and more.

"We’re excited to be leading the way in these areas with our new AI-ready data center project – with a market-leading, energy-efficient design," he says.

"For firstcolo, it’s not just about meeting today’s needs, but setting the standard for tomorrow’s data center excellence."