Every Monday morning we fire five questions at a leading C-suite figure in the business technology sector. Today we’re pleased to be joined by Rob Coupland, CEO of Pulsant, a colocation data centre provider.
What’s the Biggest Challenge for your Clients?
The kind of clients that we serve are regional enterprises. Many have complex challenges around how they handle the digital transformation of their businesses. This is exacerbated by the current COVID-19 crisis which puts further emphasis on the need to be responsive and effectively use data, as well as providing increased mobility for the workforce and customers.
Another challenge arising from this is that a lot of these organisations are relatively lean in terms of their own technology expertise.
The question for them is how to respond to the new working environment and be agile. Ultimately, the companies that can get that response right are the ones that will have competitive advantage in the market.
What is the Technology that Excites You the Most?
For me, it’s the evolution of technology such as 5G, which provides much higher speed of access to data on a mobile basis. This really opens a lot of new opportunities for applications and use of data and ultimately businesses. What’s also exciting to me is the increasing distribution of the cloud network.
In our industry we saw a consolidation into big data centre hubs in cities like London, but what this does is bring the data and the processing back towards the edge. Again, this brings lots of possibilities for businesses and particularly more regionalised ones that were a long way from the hubs before.
Greatest Success?
At the risk of probably sounding a little cheesy, it’s having a couple of teenage children that are turning into well adjusted, free thinking young adults, who are engaging and challenging in equal measure. Balancing my time between raising them and the business has shifted over the years and has certainly presented its challenges. I’m excited to see what they are going to achieve in their lives.
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Worst Failure?
There are almost too many to list! What I have learned over the years is to not be scared of failing as you just don’t get success without failure. I think the biggest failure of all is not being able to own up to things that aren’t working, but there aren’t many things you can fail at that you can’t ultimately put right. If you are going to push boundaries and constantly challenge yourself, then not everything is going to work – perhaps the greatest thing I have learned is to get comfortable with that.
In Another Life I’d Be…
…an engineer in the RAF. When I was approaching 18 and about to leave school, I knew I wanted to be an engineer and applied for it at university. However, I’d been an RAF cadet throughout school and was also accepted for officer training. Ultimately, I decided not to take that route, but somewhere in a parallel universe, I would have had a very different career.
Fortunately, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed what I’ve done over the years so I’m pretty sure I made the right choice.
