As data centres get more complex, the traditional operating model that let people make power, cooling, networking, security, and building management decisions in comfortable silos will fail. And the same risk applies to training and hiring talent.
That challenging idea comes from John H. Daniels, CEO of BICSI, the global association supporting ICT professionals with training, standards, and credentials. Daniels believes that European data centre operators must evolve beyond siloed technical planning and embrace a holistic, ecosystem-driven approach to infrastructure, technology, and workforce development to successfully meet 2030 capacity demands. Daniels will talk about these trends at Data Center World Europe, 13-14 October, in Vienna.
Ahead of his highly anticipated panel session in Vienna, Daniels shares his core leadership philosophy: Effective digital infrastructure requires looking at the entire ecosystem, demanding that we completely rethink how we design our facilities and how we build the teams that run them.
Specialize Deeply, Coordinate Early, Design Holistically
Managing increasingly complex digital infrastructure assets requires moving away from fragmented engineering. Daniels points out that as data centres increase in their size, complexity, and indispensability, the margins for error shrink, making traditional, isolated workflows a major liability for operators.
"As data centres become denser and more complex, designing infrastructure systems in isolation is becoming less practical,” he says. “Power, cooling, cabling, networking, security, and building systems are increasingly interdependent. Decisions made in one discipline can create constraints, risks, or opportunities in another."
This interdependence becomes amplified as rack densities increase and operators rapidly adopt direct-to-chip liquid cooling, higher-capacity power distribution, and highly fiber-intensive network architectures. For RCDD®s (Registered Communications Distribution Designer®) and other ICT design professionals, pathway planning must account for thermal conditions, mechanical and electrical systems, equipment access, maintainability, and future expansion.
"A pathway decision that appears minor on its own can affect cooling performance, serviceability, equipment access, resilience, and the ability to scale later,” Daniels says. “This is what I mean by infrastructure convergence: Not combining every discipline into one but designing them with enough coordination that one system doesn’t become a constraint on another."
As an example of this convergence, Daniels points to distributed fiber-optic sensing (DFOS) — an underrated technology area that highlights how infrastructure can serve a dual purpose. “We usually think about fiber as communications infrastructure. But with the right sensing technology, fiber can also provide information about certain physical conditions along its route, including temperature, vibration or acoustic activity, and strain,” he says.
By shifting our mindset, the same fiber pathways powering data transmission can deliver a source of useful data about the physical environment. For forward-thinking ICT professionals, DFOS creates powerful new possibilities to improve operations, security, condition monitoring, and maintenance across data centres and campuses.
Skills Are Infrastructure Too
The complexity and demands of next-generation data centres and hardware also requires a shift in operational culture when it comes to manging people and their skill development. "Designing interconnected infrastructure as if each discipline were independent has to go," Daniels argues. "When those disciplines are designed and coordinated too separately or too late, a decision that works well for one system can create constraints, rework, maintainability challenges, or operational risk somewhere else."
The fix isn't sacrificing deep, specialized expertise. Instead, the solution lies in when and how that expertise is brought together. By bringing the right disciplines into the conversation much earlier in the planning phase, operators can identify critical dependencies sooner, make better-informed decisions, and design around the needs of the whole environment.
However, this holistic design philosophy is dependent on one critical asset — the human workforce. Daniels warns that the industry is going to face a sharp reality check if it continues to treat recruitment as a secondary task.
"You cannot build tomorrow’s capacity with yesterday’s workforce strategy," Daniels says. "Europe’s data centre industry is rightly focused on power, land, permitting, cooling, connectivity, and technology. But that capacity still depends on people who can design, install, integrate, document, operate, and maintain increasingly complex infrastructure."
The industry faces an acute skills gap, not just a broad workforce shortage. If operators and builders wait to map their workforce development paths until after new capacity is planned, the industry will face a massive technical talent bottleneck that stymies its regional expansion goals, since it won’t have the skilled people needed to deploy the hardware safely and reliably.
"Workforce planning can’t sit beside infrastructure planning," Daniels says. "It has to be part of it."
Join the Discussion in Vienna
John Daniels will expand on these critical themes at Data Centre World Europe in Vienna (13-14 October 2026). He will be taking the stage on Wednesday, October 14th on the panel session Who's going to run all this? Training, managing, and retaining Europe's data centre and energy workforce alongside leaders from Start Campus, GARBE.DC, and JLL.
John H. Daniels, CEO, BICSI