Verne Global supports continued growth with UK hire

Verne Global, the environmentally smart data centre developer, has announced the appointment of Mike Hills as director of business development for the UK. Hills, who will be based at the company’s global headquarters in London, will support Verne Global’s rapid growth in the UK market and joins from euNetworks where he held the position of director of channel & strategic alliances.

In his newly created role at Verne Global, Hills will be responsible for expanding Verne Global’s existing presence in the UK market as well as developing strategic relationships with key partners and executing special projects. With 15 years of experience working in business development for technology companies in Europe, Hills brings extensive industry knowledge and local understanding to the role. He has also held senior sales roles at euNetworks and Adapt.

Rising and unpredictable energy prices, coupled with continued pressure on organisations to demonstrate a commitment to carbon reduction, has led to growing interest from European-based customers in Verne Global’s renewably-powered data centre facility in Iceland. Most recently, Verne Global announced that RMS, the world’s leading catastrophe risk modelling firm, will be deploying its RMS Cloud, RMS(one)™, from Verne Global’s data centre campus in Iceland.

“We’re seeing increasing interest from companies running power-intensive applications like high performance computing and big data analytics, which are now considering moving their data centre operations in order to take advantage of more affordable and greener energy sources,” said Jeff Monroe, chief executive officer of Verne Global. “The UK – with its unpredictable power supply and high energy prices – is a key market for us and, with Mike’s significant industry experience, he will play a key role in delivering to the marketplace the value that our data centre solutions can provide.”
“The data centre is currently in a disruptive period – applications that only ever used to reside on-premise are now becoming location agnostic,” said Hills. “This is a very exciting time for the industry as we see incredibly intensive and sophisticated big data, analytics, HPC and GPU-based applications freed from traditional models which were costly to run in traditional business locations. There is a significant opportunity for organisations and the industry as a whole to reconsider where both data and applications are hosted and to evaluate locations such as Verne Global that make better business sense and reduce carbon footprint associated with energy use.”