My Business Life: Brian Roe, Servecentric

My Business Life: Servecentric CEO Brian Roe shares his life and business lessons.

Brian Roe has more 25 years’ experience in the Irish IT industry and was appointed as CEO of Servecentric in 2021. Prior to this, he was responsible for all commercial and sales activities for the company.

He helped Servecentric to grow its core data centre colocation services and oversaw the company’s introduction of an Irish-owned, self-service public cloud IaaS service in 2018.

Brian’s tech career in Ireland began in 1995 when he joined Typetec, at the time a leading Apple dealer based in Dublin’s city centre. Brian started out as a Sales Executive, focusing on the sale of Apple hardware and ancillary products, but had been promoted to Sales Manager of a fledgling IT services division by the time he left in 2002 to set up a boutique web development service.

He returned to Typetec in 2007 and over the following eight years played an integral role in developing the company’s IT managed services and cloud services business, and was eventually Commercial Director with full responsibility for the organisation’s MSP division. He also had a short, but successful, stint with leading Microsoft partner, Codec.

Tell us about background, what journey did you take to arrive at where you are?

As long as I can remember, I had a fascination with how things worked, particularly in technology. I bought my first computer in 1981 and ultimately studied Computer Science in UCD. After four years abroad, working in roles in a fledgling IT services provider and a short stint in foreign exchange trading, I returned home and began my sales career in Typetec.

I ultimately took over the responsibility of running the IT managed services division of the company for a number of years, before making the slight segway into a data centre and cloud services business – Servecentric – in 2016. Five years later, I took over as CEO of the business.

What’s your USP?

The data centre industry in Ireland is dominated by a number of large multinational organisations with hundreds of facilities globally. With this scale comes great choice and connectivity, but it also brings challenges, particularly for enterprises with small to mid-size footprints.

Meanwhile, Servecentric is an indigenous Irish operator that is passionately customer-focused. We deliver flexibility and agility, as well as access to key personnel, which is unrivalled in the local market and makes life easier for our customers. This is a genuine USP as customers can struggle with the bureaucracy and timescales for project delivery or even simple change requests with global players. We also offer a 15-minute Service Level Agreement (SLA) 24 hours a day for remote hands and we provide direct access to engineers on the ground. By being more responsive and delivering world-class customer service, we stand out.

What were the origins of the business, how was it funded and what are your growth plans?

The business was initially formed out of an opportunity that arose when a US data centre company pulled out of the Irish market back in 2000. The facility was acquired by Servecentric and the company set about bringing in an anchor tenant and other key clients. After a number of years of growth, the building was purchased by Digital Realty Trust and Servecentric continues to deliver first-class colocation, cloud and connectivity services to a global customer base from this facility.

The company has always been self-funded from revenue, including a significant investment in our cloud platform which was launched in 2018. We also recently applied for planning permission to develop another Data Centre facility to enable us to further expand our data centre colocation, connectivity and cloud services. This development will give us a multi-site platform, thus improving choice and business continuity opportunities for our customers, while supporting business growth.

What are your key skills and qualities that set you apart?

I have worked with some fantastic people over the years, from sales to service delivery, and built a great network of colleagues across the IT services spectrum that I can draw upon to deliver for customer requirements.

Formulating solutions to problems from the customer’s perspective is a skill I have developed and I also have a strong technical grounding. I also never write cheques I can’t cash in terms of overselling. While I always want to get to ‘yes’, I’m not afraid of ‘no’ and as a result, I have developed excellent long-term working relationships and friendships in the market.

What (or whom) has helped you most along the way? Who was your greatest mentor/inspiration?

My father was and remains a huge inspiration for me. He had unbelievable optimism and drive, even in the face of seemingly hopeless situations. From a difficult beginning, he used his relentless perseverance and self-belief to carve out a career as one of the country’s most successful sportspeople in the years he was active.

From a business perspective, I wouldn’t say I had one single mentor or inspiration who I would always look to. Rather, I have taken what I believe are great traits or actions I have observed in many individuals over the years and try to work them into what I bring to the table.

What was the greatest piece of business advice you ever received?

One piece of advice that I apply to both my professional life and my personal life is to judge people not by what they say, but rather by what they do. People tend to be consistent in terms of their behaviours and I have learned not to dwell on people whose words and actions are inconsistent.

What circumstances/qualities/events can mark the difference between success or failure in life or business?

While success takes many forms, I believe that you can generally apply the same rules to business and personal life. For me, it’s about surrounding yourself with good people who strive to deliver success in everything they do. Good habits, like bad ones, are infectious.

What was the most challenging aspect of either starting or growing the business?

For the business we are in, the most challenging aspect to growing the business is competing with global organisations with which we also need to work in tandem.

We work hard to create USPs built around exceptional agility, accessibility to key personnel, and flexibility in service delivery, but it can be difficult to get the message out there when competing with global brands operating in the same space.

How did you navigate your business through the pandemic and what lessons did you learn?

The speed of impact and escalation to lockdown came as a surprise to everyone. Fortunately, we were agile enough to make the changes required in our business to effectively run as normal from day one. The first thing we did was reach out to all of our customers to offer different supports as our ability to fully function remained unchanged.

As a provider of essential services, we were able to continue to provide 24/7 on-site support in our data centre, which was hugely valuable to our customers who were unable to travel to or access the facility. The main lesson for me was understanding that there was a genuine variety in people’s levels of caution, fear and compliance across the population and that it was important at that time to show an understanding towards those sensitivities, regardless of your own perspective.

How has digital transformation been a factor in your scaling journey and do you believe Irish firms are utilising digital technologies sufficiently?

Digital transformation is core to our growth as most of our customers are engaged in providing the platforms to enable that transformation. I think that Covid was an enormous accelerant for transformation in general business, so now there is a more mature and informed market. Companies are increasingly looking at new ways to use digital technologies to streamline operations, improve efficiencies, and deliver products to the market.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Firstly, I’d love to do it all over again! It’s all about the journey and not necessarily the destination. To try and change things to remove negative experiences or mistakes along the way would be naïve, as we learn from these. I guess to answer the question, when I needed to make difficult decisions or changes I knew I should make, perhaps I could have acted more decisively. Procrastination is the thief of time.

Who inspires you in business today?  

It’s not quite the business world, but I think that Andy Farrell is a pretty inspirational character. He has the perfect blend of being a gifted leader who works incredibly hard to create an advantage for his team, yet gives that team the licence to make their own decisions as conditions change in front of them.

What advice/guidance do you give new hires and how do you nurture talent in your organisation?

This obviously depends on the role, but I would always invite new people to be curious about the business, to get holistic views of what we do, and to be brave in coming forward with ideas. While it is great to have staff who are strong in their field of expertise, it is also important to empower people to broaden their knowledge and understand all aspects of what we do. In addition, we have a pretty comprehensive onboarding process with initiation and multiple training schedules to ensure that we deliver consistent customer experiences in a secure and safe environment.

What business books do you read or would recommend?

I have read so many business books over the years and really for me, it’s about picking up nuggets that work for you. Truth be told, I’ve never read a business or sales leadership book that has led to an epiphany, but I try to take one or two ideas from whatever I am reading and build them into my way of working.

What technologies/tools do you use personally to keep you on track?

Given our global client base, I need to have access to the right information and be able to communicate freely from anywhere, at any time. Where I go, my laptop goes and I predominantly rely on the Microsoft productivity stack, with a little help from our Service Desk management and ERP tools for specific information. Our colocation and connectivity services are built on termed contracts and don’t change from day to day, whereas our public cloud platform has a management interface that I can access for real-time information relating to customer interaction, consumption, revenue and capacity planning. It has all the information I need to do my job in one place.

What social media platforms do you prefer and why?

I use LinkedIn on a daily basis and find it a useful tool, particularly within the IT sector. It can be a helpful resource to make initial contact and draw from common connections. Outside of LinkedIn, I don’t engage with social media platforms. For our company, I don’t believe that using any of the Meta platforms or X (formerly Twitter) would be beneficial from a business perspective and I have never really felt the desire to engage through these platforms in a personal capacity.

What are your thoughts on where technology overall is heading and how it will apply to business generally and your business particularly?

Digital transformation in our business and personal lives is constant and the next wave will see further integration of AI into everything we do as we uncover more use cases. The other areas for continued growth are IoT and security as we try to keep ahead of the bad actors in a fast-evolving landscape. In terms of the Data Centre and cloud industry, we will see higher requirements, particularly in compute environments that process data and make decisions based on that data. With high compute requirements will come even greater power overhead and we need to ensure, as a country, that we get to a place where this energy is produced in more sustainable and efficient ways.

Finally, if you had advice for your 21-year-old self – knowing what you know now – what would it be?

No difficulty is as bad as it seems at the time. I’ve definitely learned over time that very few problems are insurmountable and even those that can’t be solved are only bumps along the way. Sometimes when you’re in the deep of the forest, it’s hard to see, but time has taught me to step outside the situation and put realistic perspective on challenges… and of course, where possible, turn them into opportunities!