Ep. 185 Riccardo Impiumi, Director of Alvarez & Marsal | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast

So the big challenge in the AI and the AI go to market is marrying the classic requirements for investors of long term tenancy on data centers. So we went from roughly 10 years on average data center leases to marry that with the typical GPU lifespan which is roughly five to six years, with very limited knowledge on how that's going to last in the long term because it's relatively new technologies that we're deploying at this scale. And so that difference in timing is critical in trying to understand how the business model around leasing a facility for a long period of time to satisfy some of the investors needs to effectively reutilizing or recycling or redeploying some of the GPUs after the five years. And how that, that works into, into, into the investment is very important. Hi, it's Ricardo Impiumi, director of ours and Marcel, and you're watching the Decenter Go to Market podcast. Hi, it's Joshua Feinberg, host of the Data Center Go to Market podcast and today I am thrilled. I have a very special guest joining me today. I'm welcoming Ricardo Ampioni who is the director of Alvarez Marcel, focusing on data center digital infrastructure related investments. And Ricardo is based out of Paris, France. Ricardo, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Joshua. Nice, nice to be here. Nice to have you here as well. So what exactly does Alvarez Marcel do within the data center ecosystem, digital infrastructure and what's your specific role? What do you concentrate on with. Yeah, sorry. As part of Azure msr, we do a lot of diligence on data centers, from finance all the way to commercial and technical. The role I actually cover is leading the technical and commercial diligence on everything that is sort of telecom and data center specific, including strategy advisory and go to market strategy for data center operators as well as investors in, in the space. So it's super fascinating because a lot of times by the time I'm speaking with guests on this podcast, a lot of the directives have already been decided by the boards and the CEOs and their teams are put in place to implement it. So you have a bird's eye view on a lot of the conversations that happen before people even decide how they're going to build their commercial organizations. That's correct. And I think that's, that's the, the, the advantage of, of working on, on the, both, both sides. Right. The investor side and the developer side. Obviously the, the focuses are slightly different. Investors are currently very overwhelmed with everything we hear about AI and the noise, uh, around it where you know, the operators are Mostly focused on, you know, delivering capacity as fast as they can. So two different challenges and basically my role here is to try and try and marry the two and make sure that everybody's comfortable in their own role. Yeah, it's really fascinating and I about 100 interviews into this podcast and we don't usually get to talk with people that work with investors and certainly investors aren't big, they don't tend to talk about these topics very often. So I'm super curious to get your hands on perspective on what these conversations typically look like from what you talk about with investors and operators. What do you see as their biggest go to market challenge right now, not just in Europe, but globally. Yeah. So effectively the way the data center markets are shaped, it started with sort of collocation with large hyperscalers, first in the us, then Europe and Asia. So with very long term contracts of very stable revenues underwritten by a very stable company with very good balance sheets. Now this is very quickly shifting towards AI with new companies that are effectively, you have new players such as NeoClouds and other companies providing AI related services as well as a lot of spin offs of existing data center operators that are starting their own, their own platforms or additional people that have just power and land and want to enter into the space. So the market went from being very concentrated to very specific players to a very large in a very short span of time. And that creates a bit of fear of investors that obviously need to need to wait the risk, which is basically a key focus for investors as to how safe is it to invest in this new world of AI with NeoCloud as new players besides the typical hyperscalers that we're used to see. So that's for me is what we're focusing almost 100% of my time nowadays. Do you see anything that's breaking right now in terms of traditional planning models with both the operators and with the investors? Yeah. So the big challenge in serving the AI and the AI goods market is marrying the classic requirements for investors of long term tenancy on data center. So we went from roughly 10 years on average data center leases to marry that with the typical GPU lifespan, which is roughly five to six years with very limited knowledge on how that's going to last in the long term because it's relatively new technologies that we're deploying at this scale. And so that difference in timing is critical in trying to understand how the business model around, you know, leasing a facility for a long period of time to satisfy some of the investors needs to effectively reutilizing or recycling or redeploying some of the GPUs after the five years and how that that works into, into, into the investment is very important. And it's currently a question that I'm not sure everybody has 100% but there are, there are a few, a few ways to, to explore that. What a lot of this reminds me of is people trying to read the tea leaves and guess what certain influential leaders are saying in this space. For example, like early on in my career I did it support for equity research analysts and Merrill and people used to watch the Federal Reserve chairperson walking out of Federal Reserve meetings on CNBC and try to guess by the size of his briefcase what he was going to do. I assume that CNBC and BBC and everyone has kept up over the years trying to infer by looking at bank leaders was actually going to do. I get the same impression from a lot of the commercial leaders about how they look at Jensen Huang and Nvidia. Do you sense the same kinds of things from the operators and the investors that you speak to that they're looking at Nvidia like the North Star for all the big picture planning that's going on with predicting life cycles on GPUs and all the downstream decisions? Yeah, it's clear that Nvidia is driving this because obviously they had the largest market share. They kind of drive the GPU deployment strategy. So how often they release the new GPUs and the tokens and all that and how that's monetized is largely driven by Nvidia. And that creates a lot of pressure, I think downstream more than relief in following Jensen, in the sense that investors in New York Clouds and its operators, they feel like they have to rush to meet the new GPU requirements. From being able to monetize existing GPUs which may or may or may have not been deployed already, to data center operators trying to meet and match the new specifications that Nvidia is releasing and trying to also guess what the next generation will look like and what the requirements will be for data centers. Because obviously that requires a lot of capital investments and that capital investment needs to be paid back. So that's also what creates a lot of nervousness in the market. So when you look at how they're reacting to the signals that they're getting from Nvidia and similar kinds of luminaries in this industry, specifically focusing on high density AI infrastructure, what do you see as the biggest mistakes with planning that they tend to make? By looking at that information that everyone else has. So, and it's a big focus of mine is effectively focusing on the longer term view on how the market is evolving rather than just focusing on a particular chipset or a particular deployment. Because if we do that, we're going to miss out on effectively that capacity in the next three, four or five years. This is a typical mistake that data center operators make. We've been used over the last few 15 years, even even longer 20 years on RAD densities increasing relatively little. Like going from the 2kW in the, in the early 2000s to the 12kW we see today in colocation facilities for, for hyperscalers which required air cooling and you know, there is limited amount of modifications that are required to, to upgrade the facilities to, to new type of service. Where now we start talking about GPUs, that density goes up significantly. I go from 60 to 120 with the GB3 hundreds to the 225 kilowatt per rack on the Vera Rubins that we're expecting coming to market later this year. The increase is exponential and with that increase, the electrical and mechanical solutions that need to be deployed are, are different and need to be planned ahead to avoid expensive reworks in a few years time. Yeah, it's really fascinating to see how those changes are being looked at at the macro level, especially at the CEO level with the operators and the board of directors and the investors that you tend to interact with. But at the same time, all of these changes are happening because of high density AI workloads. There's also a lot of changes because of shifting preferences with a lot of the buyers of the digital infrastructure, the IT professionals, the engineering leaders, the construction leaders, the development leaders, the development planners. Ten years ago there was a lot of empowerment with buyers where they were doing a lot more research using mobile search on their phones. They were getting used to LinkedIn, they were getting used to watching videos on YouTube and attending webinars and listening to podcasts. We still have all of that. At the time, organizations like Gartner would find that about half of research and decision making happen before sales contact. Now it's shifted to like 85, 90% of all that research happening before sales contact. A lot of that got accelerated even more because of generative AI. So a lot of people frankly that have voted with their wallet and said I'd rather have a conversation with Claude or Copilot than a human salesperson, unless the salesperson can add so much value that I feel Like I'm talking with a peer. So it's changing the job descriptions and the hiring requirements for a lot of these commercial positions. But it's also shining a spotlight on the future role of commercial teams in buyer education. Words like transforming, pivoting to being seen more like an extension of professional development and learning and development. Teachers, consultants, trusted advisors, subject matter experts. How are, among the companies that you work with, how are you seeing leadership teams react to these shifts? There is clearly to what you're saying, a lot of research done ahead. Fortunately or unfortunately, the research remains relatively high level. So the way I see this evolving effectively is more people understanding the generic underlying requirements. But effectively this, effectively. What the consequence of this is is that there will be more in depth and more focused research following that effectively with, you know, with the engineering teams and commercial teams, et cetera. So, and we are seeing that today. Right? So we, we. In the 10 years I've been involved in the industry, the level of technical diligence and commercial, this is a legal diligence that is done on site has evolved significantly. And what before used to be what the, you know, the hyperscaler used to do in terms of diligence, now everybody does that and hyperscalers are doing even more diligence on their sites. And this is required for once because there's a lot more choice today. A lot of this choice is not relevant and is not funded. And so we need to be able to rationalize all the information that comes to us and be able to make the right choices. So to your point, yes, we need to use a lot of digital tools, but at the same time, we do need to go in a lot more depth and make sure that the investment we make and the way we go about assessing those investment is thorough and detailed. So among the core stakeholders that you're interacting with, they're using a lot of these same tools and strategies and preferences and methodologies for they're just doing more homework than they ever have because it's easier to do more research. Correct? I think that's what everybody does nowadays, not just in the space. A lot of people use new tools such as ChatGPT. Obviously you need to be able to interpret the information that receive from all these tools, but it allows within the same time frame to do a lot more work effectively, which is a big advantage, especially when they go to market. And the time to market is so important for some of these investments. Coming from the standpoint, as someone I was doing a lot of evangelizing of thought leadership and Content marketing and positioning as a subject matter expert throughout the 2010s and there was always people that would say, but our buyers are different. And I would talk to them and be like, okay, how are they different? They don't use smartphones, they don't use social media. Who are these mythical creatures? I often tell people I'm a Gen X. Everyone that I know that's a baby boomer, that's still working part time or full time or an advisory role in the status, they're fully transformed. They're on LinkedIn, they speak on webinars, they speak on podcasts. But a lot of the frustration that I hear from sales leaders, they feel like they get there too late to be able to shape the criteria. So they're all trying to get in there early. I think a lot of the conference and event investments are trying to do an end run around trying to get in early enough to shape the criteria. From where you sit, what does a potential buyer have to believe about a company and about the person or interacting with the company to want to be motivated to take that meeting? Well, there are a set of criteria, right? So I think the most important thing that an investor is looking for today is the management, and I say management, also the company, their best experience, how reputable they are in the industry, Do I believe that they are capable of delivering what they're saying they will? And then I would look at track record and you know, what have they built? What is the feedback in the industry on these players? I think these are probably factors that are key and there's a lot of background research that is done before meeting these players. And it's fundamental, right? Besides the proposition that the sales team can make on these are our new sites. This is how we, this is how we go to market. If the fundamentals are not there, then it's very hard to take people seriously afterwards. This is something that, it's two key parameters that myself I look for when I'm introduced to new companies and I look for data center capacity. A lot of the digital artifacts that you're finding on websites and social media and on the LLMs are actually already helping you make a decision about whether you even want to get to that first interaction. Yes, it allows to do some pre research, very, very simple, very easily and it allows to ask some pointed questions when you meet the counterparty. So it does help quite a lot. Obviously that can be done today very quickly. Everybody has some sort of presence on the Internet. So in a positive and negative way that helps quite A lot. I think we're past the stage where everyone that realized that LinkedIn needs to be a priority has already done it. If they're not maybe beyond help, correct? Yes. And not just that. Obviously there are other platforms where people do tend to say things and present things, so it's very easy to check somebody's background. Nowadays that's a whole separate conversation as well, where we see especially among the data center operators, where there's such risk aversion. One of the non stop trends that I've seen in a few years of running this podcast is there's a lot of people and it tends to be a little more pronounced in the U.S. than outside the U.S. but there's a lot of people that work for data center operators that would love to come on a podcast like this and share what they've learned in their marketing career and sales career and product management careers. But their employers literally forbid it because they want to be able to have a very, very scripted conversation where someone from PR or PR agency or something is word by word monitoring what they say. So it's interesting that we're in this place and I feel like when operators and developers are frustrated that the community stakeholders don't trust them. I feel like they've squandered a lot of the opportunities to have hundreds of people, thousands of people in their companies be really good at being spokespersons for sticking up for the developers in the communities. Yeah, there are some of them, some of these platforms are doing it quite well. There's. I know a few in Europe, so I knew A few CEOs that are quite, quite presence in social media. Some others are, I guess a bit more conservative. It's just a take from the different operators. Right. There are pros and cons. Sometimes keeping your cars close to your tester is important, especially when there's lots of competition and you're trying to come up with some innovative solutions. And because the market is shifting so fast over the last or especially over the last five years, I think some of these solutions are better not spoken out loud on social media because they do provide that significant advantage to some of these operators. Yeah, I think a lot of people have looked at their culture, their policy, how they think about go to market and brand building and visibility as part of a core differentiator. And I think that's going to continue to evolve. When you talk to CEOs, when you talk to boards, when you speak with investors, if there's one go to market lesson or best practice that you've seen over the past 10 years that you wish everyone would follow as like Ricardo's law of GTM go to market fundamentals in the space. What would that one best practice be? That's a very good question and I think if I was to choose one, I would say, you know, start small within your capabilities and focus on a few key clients and develop that relationship to make sure that, you know, your reputation in the market is spotless. That for me is probably the most important thing that I've learned over the last few years. A lot of people that have come to the data center industry later in their career have come from SAS software as a service or infrastructure as a service. And one of the big narratives is that a lot of the data center industry tends to be a little bit slower, a little more conservative, a few years behind the times and how they approach their go to market and where some of these larger investments tend to be. What do you see as a go to market strategy in the data center industry that's already starting to fail and lose a lot of steam, but people are largely in denial about it, at least for now. I think it's all the operators that still think that doing what they were doing five years ago is still relevant. I think that they will soon find out that the strategy was probably not the best strategy. Thinking looking forward on how to overcome some of the biggest challenges, for example supply chain and procurement or long lead items, there is a the whole industry evolving around that and if we do stick to our usual practices, we're going to quickly fall behind simply because others will build better and quicker and faster and that will effectively allow them to grow their platforms much quicker and capture all that market demand that's currently out there. Most data center GTM teams are flying completely blind. 83% of your buyer's journey is happening before they even speak with someone from your sales team. The Data Center Go to Market podcast is powered by DCSMI. We've studied over 1900 industry leaders to build a diagnostic framework that identifies exactly why deals fall apart and revenue stalls. Stop guessing and start benchmarking. Subscribe now to our weekly Data Center GTM briefing at www.dcsmi.com briefing. Again, that's dcsmi.com forward/briefing. B R I E F I N G In a world where so much of this research and decision making now happens before these initial conversations, we know that content and events can play a large role in shaping the marketplace's perception about a particular company and even the stakeholders within the company within this context, a lot of times sales teams and marketing teams and product teams and the executive sponsors of all of these initiatives sometimes find that the technical content isn't really generating the commercial outcome that they'd be looking for or it doesn't align. We know there's so much more competition for attention. There's so much noise, globalization, the generative AI, all of this tends to be accelerating. From your perspective, why have you seen that some of these big initiatives around technical content don't get to the clear line of sight with generating revenue? I think there's generally a disconnect between the sort of technical content, as you say, and the economic value that the technical content just drives and that message, that economic part, economic value, what, what value does it bring to me, you know, as, as a potential client, as a potential investor, that that message is very, very often doesn't, doesn't come through. And, you know, so there's sort of this lack of understanding what, you know, investors require, what clients require. And, you know, there is, I think of a bit of a disconnect that needs to be, needs to be, needs to be covered. And so this understanding of what, as an investor, what I'm looking at, how do I, how do I look at risk, how do I look at a return on my investments? That's generally lacking. And I think there is a general lack of understanding of this in the industry, especially from operators. Obviously this gap is getting closed a little with some of the investors actually taking a more active role in the control companies, which is very beneficial because effectively it starts educating the company to look at things in a slightly different way. There is still a bit of a message needs to be rolled through to the sales team and how they present things. But yeah, I think that for me, that gap between technical and kind of commercial value, that's where things don't match up. One of the areas that we see a lot of companies struggle with is when you look at a major conference, many times the conference producers feel that a big strength of the conference is that there's a lot of different kinds of companies there and a lot of different kinds of stakeholders there. From our standpoint, the Data Center Sales and Marketing Institute, we track 57 different business models in the data center industry. And a lot of the conferences, when they're promoting the conferences, they're talking about that there's literally a dozen or more different kinds of businesses that are there. And each of those businesses presumably has their top two or three different stakeholders they interact with. So in many ways it's almost like a buffet, a smorgasbord, a sampler platter where there's a lot of a little different things. Do you feel that, do you see the companies doing a good job with like the targeting and the segmenting and figuring out where to concentrate their efforts or does it get reminds me a little bit of the Michael Lewis book and the movie about the housing crisis from 2008 with the mortgage backed securities and not knowing what the composition of the bonds were in it. Do you feel that the commercial teams truly understand the basics of like ideal client profiles and segmentation and buyer Personas well enough to do this or do we need to go back to the basics? For companies that didn't really Master these in the 2010s there is a bit of both, right? There is this understanding that there is a big conference and everybody needs to go there and it needs to be big. To a lot of these conferences I've been to, very often the focus is very small. Right. So you're only there for a specific part of the conference. I guess more targeted conferences would be more ideal. But to your point, there is a lot of investors and a lot of people in the industry that still needs that to understand what they're, what that business model looks like. And perhaps they're looking for inspiration in understanding how different business model can operate. And that's why there is a bit of, to your point, a buffet selection of conferences and companies you can approach trying to understand different ways of looking at things. There are pros and cons I do like to exchange with peers to see things in a slightly different way to try and see from their point of view strengths and weaknesses to the business model compared to the one I support my clients with. So yeah, it really depends and I think that's the big challenge with finding the return on investment on these huge investment. We estimate by some measure there may be 3,400 million dollars a year or more being spent on global data center conferences. They're huge, huge numbers. And I look at is it really about just hanging out with and sharing stories about what's working and what's not with your peers? Or is everyone under pressure to achieve commercial outcomes? And if they're under pressure to achieve commercial outcomes, is there enough due diligence going on of saying, okay, these are the demographics that the conference said they had last year. This is who they think they're going to be this year? Let's on the other side of the screen, let's pull up our ideal client profile on our target Personas and see if there's a match with that. But people are really, I get the whole idea that face to face is super important, but I usually push back and say, yes, but if you could have 20 people in a room paying attention to your top subject matter experts for 45 minutes to an hour, and it was exactly the right people from exactly the right companies and you could do this for a fraction of the cost, would you do it and be like, yeah, that's why we go to conferences. I'm like, well, do you have a conference room? Do you have a classroom? If you've ever done webinars, you realize like all of those investments are a fraction and so much more. But everyone's so hung up on the size of the room. I think something's getting lost in the narrative and the challenge is figuring out how to help people see these big picture issues and figure out if they really do need that broad exposure and spending all their time with peers, competitors, indirect competitors, or whether they should be focusing a lot more with surgical laser precision. Yes, and, and to, to your point, I think there's a lot of work that goes up, goes up, you know, in the background. You know, there are some big conferences happening in Europe at this moment and I've, I've had a lot of conversation with a lot of data center operators and brokers around, you know, future availability in Europe and in the U.S. so there are, there are this conversation and kind of more focused groups to your point, and everybody still tell you, can we meet up in, at the conference to discuss this? And it's like often, you know, you don't really have the time and there's a lot of stakeholders, so it's really hard to talk in, you know, at least to a certain level of details and there are a lot of follow ups from that. But to the extent going to one of these conferences allow you to maybe enlarge your network and meet some of the peers that you wouldn't have met otherwise. So there are a lot of pros. I think the message I would say is, you know, if you do make connection, then follow up on them. Yeah, I think a lot of people still haven't woken up to the reality that there's going to be 25 or 30 touch points between that initial goal or problem and when they actually buy. And just getting in one, one or two of those usually isn't enough. No, exactly. There's, there's literally between, you know, first contact to, to closing of a, of, of a deal. There's a few months go by. Right. So there's a lot of work that needs to happen, a lot of conversations, a lot of on the technical aspect, commercial aspects and legal aspects. So it does take generally a couple of months to close any deals, at least. So to your point, you can't do that over a conference. Do you think that sales teams are losing more deals to competitors or inertia and lack of any kind of meaningful decision on the part of the stakeholders that they're speaking with? I think that the market is very much of a buyer's market nowadays. So it's still very easy for companies to sell their capacity as long as their go to market strategy and the sales strategy is correct. And when I say that is effectively they actually know what they're talking about and not just trying to sell something that they, they may or may not have. And on which details are not necessarily to the level that a client would expect. But I think that the market is currently favorable, it will remain favorable for the upcoming, for the foreseeable future. Especially driven by a lot of the new data centers and the AI demand that's fueling a lot of the capacity. In terms of megawatts right now before we were building five, 10 megawatt data centers. Now we're already talking about, you know, 100 megawatts plus or 1 gigawatts in the U.S. so there is a lot of supply going happening at the same time. This supply is, is, is slowed by the fact that, you know, you need power, you need the land, so and a lot of capital investment. So, you know, because the demand is growing faster than the supply can, can meet. I think, yeah, if you're a good salesman, you should be able to sell your capacity very quickly. Ricardo, you're in a great place in that you get to spend most of your time with decision makers on both the investor side and on the operator side. But one of the biggest challenges and frustrations among commercial teams is they just struggle to get access to the actual decision makers. And they're willing to do anything, whether it's 14 hours of flights to go to a conference. If that person wants to have a cabana party or play golf or take them to a football game or a baseball game. They're willing to do anything within reason to get face time with the true economic decision makers. Why do you think they struggle so much to get to be able to build and nurture those relationships with people that can actually say yes, it is very important to be able to speak to the C level and Decision makers. And the reason why very often conversation can advance significantly and then they stop is that very often there are misalignments or there are challenges internal to a company that effectively blocks some of the messages going to decision makers. And the decisions that are made may not actually be aligned with the investment team or with the data center deployment team, depending on the company. So the more, the further down in the value chain you interact, the more steps you have to the actual decision. So the other way around, the closest you get to the decision maker, the less work you need to do to convince them because you have less steps on your way. So you see the classic mid level of someone that's protecting their job and protecting their team with something that may not necessarily be something that's best for the client, best for the company, but it serves their and their team's short term interests. There's a lot of that interest needs to be aligned. And it's also a job of an executive to make sure those interests are aligned within the company. It doesn't often happen and very often you have external advisors, you have different teams with different interests and that can slow down the process quite significantly or block it altogether. Given that most of the commercial teams spend most of their time working on getting deals over the finish line, what do you think is more dangerous to the success of a deal? A competitor or indifference on the part of the prospect client? No, I think that the prospect clients are being bombarded with offers effectively. The second you say I'm looking for some capacity, everybody jumps at you. I think being concrete and being, being realistic with what you have to offer is very important because again to what I was saying earlier in this podcast, you know, your relation, the relationship is, is. Is key for, for. For successful business and reputation is very important. Reputation. You know, it's. Albeit it's a market that has grown significantly that it's not that big. So people tend to know each other and bridges can burn very quickly. I tend to ask people quite often on this podcast to share something that they thought would work but didn't. Something essentially that failed. I get a lot of great stories from operators. I don't frequently get that kind of insight into experiments that investors have tried that didn't work out. What's something really interesting? Obviously without naming specifics that you've seen an investor try that just didn't work for them on the go to market side. I think the the for. For some of my, of my clients, I think the. The what didn't really work out is you Know, saying, well, we're going to have a large outreach and then, you know, and cast a, cast a wide net and then, you know, someone will buy it and, and we'll, we'll, we'll close that way. It very rarely worked. I think what's important is actually having having a defined strategy, a defined strategy that, you know, it's concrete and it takes small step to get, to get to the goal that you, you want to get to. And you know, so having this, you know, big ideas of growing really fast and, and just, you know, trying to, trying to work with whoever is available out there very rarely works and it's very dangerous and could back. And it does backfire in the sense that it can be quite successful in the beginning, but then to keep up the pace and keep up the demands from the other parties can be quite challenging and can be quite difficult. Speaking of other parties, leaders are constantly having to make decisions about talent acquisition, what they hire in house, what they decide to outsource. From the perspective of the kind of operators that you've worked with and the investors that you advise, is there a general consensus on something that should always be done internally and never outsourced? I think there's a lot of internal knowledge and the engineering. I think it's something that I would recommend to keep in house because that's what gives a competitive edge against, against some of the competitors. Operations generally can be outsourced and some sometimes even, even easier to outsource that compared to, to just developing that in house because the amount of people required in the training. The other thing I would recommend to, to, to keep in house perhaps is, is a sales commercial team because it's just easier to control compared to, to outsourcing a lot of the, the capacity to external parties. It's actually interesting that you brought up both engineering and commercial because we're increasingly seeing a huge trend over the last 12 or 18 months where so many commercial roles among operators and on the facility side especially now, want account executives, sales development reps, business development managers to come from a engineering background to have at least a bachelor's in engineering. Are you seeing that with the kind of companies that you work with? Yes, there is some of that and the reason, I understand the reason and it's because for someone with engineering background, and it works the same thing on sales commercial is that they actually have an understanding, they can be at ease discussing some of the technical challenge and technical complexities of data centers, which is something that somebody doesn't have the understanding or the background, it might take a lot more time to get used to. And so. Yeah, and I think that's, that's a reason why a lot of, there's a lot of engineering moving across different, different functions within a business and not, not just commercial from, from my experience. Yeah, we seem to notice. And it's not just engineering roles that are all of a sudden in high demand to join commercial teams. We see a lot of career IT professionals who just like the engineers, have never worked in a sales capacity in their entire career. And all of a sudden they're in a high demand for chief commercial officers and chief revenue officers to bring them in to support them. And I think a lot of what they're trying to do is in the self driven buyer's journey where so many technical, cynical buyers on the client side have become really sales allergic, marketing allergic. They don't want to hang out with sales and marketing people anymore, they don't want to socialize with them, but they will still hang out with and socialize with their peers. So to the extent that someone on their team is a peer or was a peer in the very recent past, you know, within the last 6, 12, 24 months, that seems to be the VIP card to get past the bouncer and engage in these kinds of conversations. Yeah. The best salespeople I've met on all my projects were actually engineers originally. Obviously they spent a long time in sales. But when you look at the background and you ask about the background, they were other IT engineers or you know, electrical mechanical engineers that turn into commercial roles. The only other place that I've seen that starts to approximate that is I've noticed among some of the data center operators on sales teams, a lot of long term professionals who've been in this space are spending a lot more time on upskilling. They're trying to take the same kind of training and certification programs that a lot of their core buyer Personas do so they can show credibility with credentialing, that they're at least in the same place where like an entry level or mid level hire would have in their organization. I think that's helping to a large degree as well, especially for people that spend a lot of time giving tours of facilities. But it's the same basic reinforcement as the level of technical expertise required in a world where you're essentially competing for attention against generative AI. It just keeps leveling up. Yes. And it has the face value. Right. All this training, obviously, having done a lot of visits of data centers with, you know, very technically Trained clients, it's very easy to tell who's, who has the right knowledge or not. There is a minimum requirements for sure, and I think that is very important for somebody in sales. And obviously, you know, there is an engineering team, you know, there is an engineering team that can, that can answer all the complex questions. But having a minimum, minimum understanding is very important because obviously, you know, these facilities are becoming more and more complex. And so, you know, there is a need of education for the client. Whether they are, you know, whether you're, you're walking around with an engineering team or you're walking around with investors. You know, everybody's getting more and more sophisticated. I tell people too, that despair a little bit that they're less technical than some of their peers in their company. That's, it's not a huge deal. As long as there's someone sitting next to you on your team that you're bringing along with you. There's still going to be a really important role for people that coordinate these curated educational events and moderators and concierges and tour guides. But at the same time, I think a lot of technical decision makers are deciding whether to move forward or not based on the credibility and the expertise of people that are on the team. And not, not everyone on the team needs to be the thought leader, needs to be the, the most senior engineer on the team. But I think they're not going to have confidence unless they see that, that particular, that, that kind of talent exists in the organization. Absolutely. And my recommendation would be to have an engineer sitting next to you in any of these conversations. Ricardo, when you look at, into your crystal ball and you think about 12, 18, 24 more months out, what do you think is going to change about how you spend your time on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis? I think the trend that we've noticed over the last couple of years, which is AI infrastructure demand will outpace supply and power availability and land become critical constraints. I think a lot of the focus will be funding the land, funding that power and deliver as fast as you can. I'm seeing a lot of, you know, few years back, you would expect a data center to be built in 24 months. Now there was a lot of pressure to build that in, you know, 15 to 12 months. So a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, how to say, pressure to deliver and there's a lot of new ideas that are coming to market to be able to overcome some of the challenges that we're seeing. Obviously, I think what, what's the what's coming next is effectively validate all this AI business model that we are creating because they are new and over the, over the next five years we'll, you know, we'll find out if we're right or we're wrong. I think that'll be a hopefully nice surprise and at the same time that will cause I think a consolidation amongst the providers of these platforms with I guess the winning ones being the ones that can combine the technical excellence with operational execution. So for me that's where I see the market going over the next five years. And yeah, we could probably do a whole separate episode on interesting takeaways in mergers and acquisition and consolidation because there continues to be so much of that going on in this space. But when you look at just the future looking predictions of where we're going next, what do you think is the big capability that organizations need to be investing in now that they're going to wish that they had two years from now? I believe there's more of like a transition towards understanding more complex infrastructure. Right. We've gone to something that was relatively simple and straightforward to something that's ever changing and lots of solution. There's a lot of, I think, technical upskill that's required across the investors. To your point, there's a lot of M and A activity which means that people are still relatively bullish about the market. But at the same time I think there is a certain nervousness around the ability of sustaining the pace that we've seen over the last few years. Ricardo, this has been fascinating to get your perspective. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, I don't often get to have the investors perspective on these commercial kind of conversations. So really, really cool to get a look behind the curtain on what goes on in these conversations. If someone wants to keep track of what you're working on, learn a little bit more about your consulting practice and what you do at Alvarez and Marcel. Is LinkedIn a good place to start? Yeah, absolutely. That's a good place to start. Yes. We'll include links to your LinkedIn profile and the company page and the website there and the blog post in the show notes for anyone that's curious to learn more. But yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to join me today. I've been speaking with Ricardo Amputi who is the director at Alvarez and Marcel, based in Paris, France. Thanks so much, Ricardo. Thanks Joshua. Thanks for having me. Very welcome. Most data center GTM teams are flying completely, completely blind. 83% of your buyer's journey is happening before they even speak with someone from your sales team. The Data Center Go to Market podcast is powered by DCSMI. We've studied over 1900 industry leaders to build a diagnostic framework that identifies exactly why deals fall apart apart and revenue stalls. Stop guessing and start benchmarking. Subscribe now to our weekly Data center gtm briefing@www.dcsmi.com briefing. Again, that's D C S M I.com briefing B R I E F I N G.