Myall (pictured), a former Interoute executive until after the GTT takeover in 2018, was at Epsilon just 17 months before taking up the new role this month – though Epsilon was still listing him on its website this morning as one of the management team.
Myall said: “The team at Kao Data have an outstanding reputation within the industry and I’m delighted to have joined as their new CEO.”
Kao Data said that Myall’s arrival enables Paul Finch to transition from the role of interim CEO and continue to serve as the company’s chief operating officer. Finch, a former executive with Digital Realty, joined Kao Data in 2016 as CTO before becoming both CEO and COO last year.
Myall said: “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.”
Kao Data is based in Harlow, north of London, on the site of the former Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, where Charles Kao (pronounced “cow”) invented optical fibres – for which he won the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics.
Kao Data said the timing of the appointment “is crucial as the company prepares for the second construction phase of its £230 million Harlow campus development”.
David Bloom, Kao Data board member and partner at investment firm Goldacre-Noé group said: “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.”
In a note to Capacity, Myall said that Kao Data represents “the highest end of computing technology today. It requires the highest quality and latest power and cooling technologies available for a successful and cost-effective deployment. We also have great focus on the green agenda in delivering our services.”
At Interoute, Myall led its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and cloud computing business units and was responsible for handling large-scale, blue chip digital transformation projects. Together, this helped grow the Interoute business to €750 million and contributed to its $2.3 billion acquisition by GTT in 2018.
GTT has now agreed to sell its infrastructure business, of which Interoute is a key component, to US company I Squared Capital (ISQ) for $2.15 billion.
