DC : What do you see as the core trends or technologies that will drive the biggest change in the future , and how will COVID-19 affect the market ?
PP : Sustainability is going to be a key market driver and it ’ s something that has to be thought about very smartly when designing any data center . And that ’ s not just building cheaper or less – that ’ s impossible the way the market is going – it ’ s about finding ways to build and operate more efficiently , to find ways of distributing the heat produced by the data centers such as heat networks that could be used to heat homes or water and so on . Likewise , cooling and access to water will become more important as we are forced to build in already built up areas . However we do it , sustainability has to be at the core . The second driver of change will be how quickly technology evolves .
More broadly , I think COVID-19 will only increase the demand . Even now in Europe we ’ re at the point where we can ’ t build data centers fast enough , but the huge changes brought about by COVID – working from home , introducing new technologies to facilitate different working models and so on – makes it very likely that demand will just explode over the next five years as technology and data plays a much greater role for every organisation . It ’ s going to be big – really big .
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