All well in Data Centre World

The Electrical Review team yesterday visited Data Centre World at London's Olympia. We were delighted to see the exhibition and conference thriving, with high visitor volumes even at the very end of the day. The sector appears to be enjoying great success.

The seventh Jones Lang LaSalle European Data Barometer report released recently indicates despite current economic uncertainty, the supply and demand balance of the European data centre market remains positive. Almost half of the respondents surveyed are expecting to expand the size of their in-house technical floorspace portfolio over the coming year, a proportion unchanged since the last survey, whilst there has been a marginal increase in those expecting to increase their ‘third party’ operated data centre stock.

David Willcocks, lead director for data centre solutions at Jones Lang LaSalle said: “The overall message still appears to be one of ‘wait and see’ rather than anything more worrying and we are witnessing people maintaining a ‘business and usual’ stance which is encouraging. It is still too early to predict whether, in the longer term, the turmoil in the Eurozone will reduce demand in the sector, but the survey has shown us that a significant number of companies are planning to expand in the second half of 2012.”

Not everything was running quite as well as the exhibition yesterday. Hundreds of visitors were delayed at London's Earls Court station after Transport for London (TfL) omitted to tell travellers no trains were running to Olympia for the duration of the show. One can only presume TfL's data centre specialists were eager to have the exhibition to themselves for a couple of hours….