Breaking Into The Data Center Industry

Daniel English is the President and Co-Founder of Legacy Investing, an investment firm focused on technology impacted real estate. Legacy has completed >$3B in transactions across 19M SF in data centers, e-commerce industrial assets, and life science buildings. Prior to co-founding Legacy Investing, Daniel was a tech start-up executive with leadership roles across M&A, corporate development, strategy, and product management. Daniel studied engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and Economics and Finance at Emory University.

Grace Li, CFA, is a Vice President at Devonshire Investors, the private equity group for Fidelity Investments. The group oversees a multi-billion dollar portfolio of real estate, venture capital and wholly-owned operating companies. Grace is currently focused on the telecom investments at Devonshire Investors. The portfolio includes COLT Technology Services, a fiber-optic network provider throughout Europe and Asia and COLT Data Center Services, a carrier neutral data center operator throughout Europe and Asia, as well as other telecom-related investments. Earlier in her career, Grace worked in private equity focusing on hotel investments with Thayer Lodging Group, part of Brookfield Properties and in real estate debt financing with GMAC Capital Corp.

Jeff heads our Real Estate and Communications practices in New York and has significant experience in general commercial real estate law. Jeff’s general real estate practice includes acquisitions, sales, development, leasing, and borrower’s side financing. He also has a particular focus on real estate challenges facing communications, technology, and energy companies, and represents property owners and telecom companies in telecom real estate matters, such as data center leases. His clients include both large national companies and smaller, local clients. He is frequently invited to speak on real estate, data center, and telecom topics. He also writes for several industry publications, and he is regularly quoted in national media. Jeff was a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and led many of its major real estate and telecom transactions.

Philbert Shih is the Founder and Managing Director of Structure Research, an independent research firm focused on the cloud, hosting and data centre infrastructure service provider markets. Structure Research is squarely focused on the SMB to mid-tier segments with an emphasis on international markets, particularly the Asia-pacific region. Services include publication of syndicated and customized research and analysis, strategic consulting, advisory services and public speaking. Clients include service providers, technology vendors supplying service providers and investors.

Sean is a seasoned IT professional, entrepreneur, author and investor. He has worked over the years with hundreds of startups and scaling companies as a general advisor, director, consultant, professional trainer and award winning sales producer. He has produced dozens of high impact sales and data center marketplace training events across the country and negotiated hundreds of data center and hosting contracts with service providers around the world. Sean also spends his time serving as an industry advocate through his work with the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2C) in Washington DC as well the North Carolina Board of Science, Technology and Innovation (NCBSTI), InfraGard and the North Carolina District Export Council (NCDEC) in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Miles Loo Jr., CRE, FRICS, joined Newmark Valuation & Advisory in 2017 in the Downtown Los Angeles office, where he serves as Vice Chairman and the Global Lead for Newmark Valuation & Advisory’s Data Centers & Life Science group. Miles is well recognized as the industry’s leading appraiser of data center properties. His experience includes advising private equity funds, institutional investors, large pension funds, Fortune 500 companies, cloud companies and Global IT conglomerates on investments in all types of data centers, including mission critical, disaster recovery data centers, colocation facilities, carrier hotels, internet gateways and life science properties. These assignments have involved data centers owned and/or operated by Fortune 500 companies across numerous industries as well as Uptime Institute Site Certified Tier III and Tier IV facilities; U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) LEED Platinum, Gold and Silver buildings; and state and federal disaster recovery data centers. Miles has led valuations of large individual and portfolio valuations spanning multiple countries across six continents (NA, EMEA, APAC, LATAM and African regions) and has consulted on a number of the world’s largest data centers.

Adam Knobloch has been involved in the commercial real estate event and media space since 2010, having held roles in sales, account management, production and coordination. He joined Bisnow Media as the Global Director of Data Centers after having led event sales and strategy efforts in the CRE space for nearly a decade. Since 2012, he has found a significant passion for the data center and technology sectors, while building an international network of active followers across numerous asset classes in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland. In his current role, Adam oversees Bisnow Media's event and sponsored media strategy for the data center sector, having expanded its Datacenter Investment Conference & Expo (DICE) Series event offerings to more than 15 markets, with an international presence in the UK and Canada. He previously held a board member role on the Telecom Exchange (TEX) Advisory Board, collaborating on content, speaker recommendations and event strategy. Additionally, he has made a point of promoting local and national organizations with a focus on STEM education and advancing the next generation into the technology sector through support, collaboration and ambassadorship. Notable organizations include the Nomad Futurist Academy, Infrastructure Masons, H5 Data Centers' STEM Fest and local chapters of both 7X24 Exchange and AFCOM. In his personal life, Adam is a musician, having toured the east coast as the drummer of The Gantry. He was a frequent member of the NYC folk/indie rock music scene and is currently the drummer for A.M. County. Adam holds a Bachelor's Degree of Business Administration from American University's Kogod School of Business, with a focus on Marketing and Public Relations.