Kao Data, the UK Innovation Corridor’s award-winning state-of-the-art data centre campus, has appointed Lee Myall as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to lead its next stage of corporate growth and expansion.
Lee’s arrival enables interim CEO, Paul Finch to focus on his continuing role as the company’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) at a crucial time as Kao Data prepares for the second construction phase of its £230m Harlow campus development.
With an extensive background within privately owned international tech companies, Lee Myall brings first class commercial leadership experience along with strategic management of high growth, scale-up environments and business transformation strategies. With a passion for managing mission-critical digital infrastructure, Lee Myall has previously worked across the telco, software, cloud services, data centres and connectivity sectors.
His earlier career includes responsibility for overseeing the success of SaaS provider WAM!NET in Europe, leading to its acquisition by SAVVIS in 2003, as well as the inception and delivery of a complex solutions division at Interoute, one of Europe’s largest independent fibre networks and cloud networking platforms. Whilst there, Lee pioneered its IaaS/cloud computing business units and was responsible for handling large-scale, blue chip digital transformation projects. Together, this helped grow the Interoute business to €750M and contributed to its successful sale in a $2.3BN acquisition by GTT in 2018. Lee most recently served as Chief Commercial Officer at Epsilon, a cloud and fabric connectivity platform before joining Kao Data.
Lee, who takes up his position as CEO with immediate effect, said: “The team at Kao Data has an outstanding reputation within the industry and I’m delighted to be joining as their new CEO.
“The importance of mission-critical digital infrastructure to industry, business and society has never been more paramount. I'm excited to be part of Kao Data’s strong and dynamic leadership team and, with a perfectly aligned commercial strategy, we are on track to become the UK’s preeminent provider of advanced colocation for high performance computing, artificial intelligence and enterprise.”
David Bloom, Kao Data Board Member and Partner at investment firm Goldacre-Noé Group said, “On behalf of the Board, we are delighted to be welcoming Lee to the company as our new CEO. Lee joins Kao Data at an exciting time and his impressive track record in corporate and commercial management provides Kao Data with the perfect leadership to drive our next phase of growth.”
He added: “The Board wishes to thank Paul for his phenomenal contribution to the company as interim CEO and, with the executive team complete, Paul is now able to fully focus as our COO - spearheading Kao Data’s operational and technical expansion to meet our accelerated customer demands.”
For more information visit Kaodata.com
About Kao Data
Founded in 2014, Kao Data develop and operate advanced data centres for high performance colocation. From our hyperscale inspired campus in the heart of the UK Innovation Corridor between London and Cambridge - we provide cloud, HPC, AI and enterprise customers with a world-class home for their compute.
Our Harlow campus - built on the site of Sir Charles Kao’s pioneering discovery of fibre optic cable in 1966 - is a development of four state-of the-art, OCP-Ready™, carrier neutral data centres. When fully completed the 15 acre, +£230m campus will support an ITE load of over 40MW, across 150,000sq ft of technical space – all powered by 100% renewable energy.
Backed by Legal & General and Goldacre - Noé Group, Kao Data is one of the largest campus developments in the UK and represents the future in sustainable, efficient and scalable computing - providing an industry blueprint to develop further best-in-class data centres.