Global Switch announces new Senior Management appointments

Global Switch, a leading owner, operator and developer of large-scale, carrier and cloud neutral multi-customer data centres in Europe and Asia-Pacific, is pleased to announce the appointments of Matthew Dent as Chief Commercial Officer and Peter Knapp as Group Director, Europe. 

Chief Commercial Officer
In this newly created role, Matthew will focus on business growth, return on investment and strategies to deliver a growing market profile and further improve commercial performance. He will lead the Commercial, Marketing and Communications, and Legal teams, as well as have functional responsibility for procurement and infrastructure life cycle assessments.

Matthew has over 15 years of senior management experience in the data centre sector and has a broad knowledge of strategic investment management, valuation, property and data centre development, marketing and finance. He has spent the past 12 years as Managing Director of Glebe, a UK property fund and asset manager. He was also CEO of a central London retail data centre, which he founded and developed as part of Glebe’s investment portfolio. Matthew previously worked at Global Switch between 2001-2006.

Group Director, Europe
Peter will be responsible for leading Global Switch’s data centres in continental Europe, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Madrid and Paris. His primary focus will be to direct and monitor the European sales efforts, principally around existing customer relationships and new prospects, and to ensure the successful delivery of business plans.  He will also oversee the development of Frankfurt North, Global Switch’s new €115m state-of-the-art facility which is located immediately adjacent to the existing Frankfurt South data centre and is due to launch in 2019.

Peter has over 28 years of experience in the ICT industry, the majority of which has been in the data centre sector. For over a decade he was Managing Director of the German company of a large European data centre provider, where he successfully built up the business to the largest entity with the highest growth within the Group. He has also worked for a number of technology companies, including most recently as Global Chief Digital Officer & Executive Vice President Infrastructure of Samson AG, and also for Kana Software, Oracle and Cambridge Technology Partners.

John Corcoran, CEO of Global Switch, said: “Matthew Dent and Peter Knapp both bring exceptional knowledge and expertise of the data centre market which will greatly assist us as we continue to grow and expand our market leading offering across Europe and Asia-Pacific.”