KAO Data has appointed Gerard Thibault as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) to oversee the final commissioning of the Kao Data Campus in Harlow, Essex and deliver the platform for further expansion. Mr. Thibault joins Kao Data after an 11-year career at industry leader, Digital Realty, where he had responsibility for the design and implementation of over 150MW of data centre space across 24-sites globally.
As CTO, Mr. Thibault will lead the design strategy at Kao Data, working closely with the delivery and operations team led by Paul Finch, COO. Key to the appointment is Mr. Thibault’s experience in developing long-term sustainability solutions using the cutting-edge design, focussed on customer technology requirements.
Commenting on the appointment, Jan Daan Luycks, CEO at Kao Data said. “The addition of Gerard to the team is a major step in Kao’s strategic and customer plan. The Kao Data Campus illustrates our capabilities and our intention to become a leading provider of data centre infrastructure. The London-Stansted-Cambridge corridor is a strategic location for the continued development of future-proofed IT infrastructure for a variety of life science, finance, media and web organisations.”
The wealth of experience within Kao Data will provide the support and management to allow customers to plug into an eventual 35MW of hyper-connected, highly resilient and secure data centre capacity, at the leading edge of design specification. Kao Data London One, the company’s first data centre at the Kao Data Campus is on schedule to go live with 8.8MW white space capacity by December 2017.
Mr. Thibault is a Chartered Engineer, having graduated with an Honours Batchelor of Science degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering in 1986. He has continued to gain qualifications in building services engineering, including becoming an Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Designer (ATD) in 2010.
