The tech pioneer with his head in the cloud

Mike Kelly founder of Datacentred

INTERNET pioneer Dr Mike Kelly, who was one of the first to foresee the rise of data centres, believes the development of cloud computing will be the next big online innovation.

A former Manchester University academic, Dr Kelly launched Telecity in 1998 when there was just one other data centre in Europe.

He helped build it to a market capitalisation of £1bn during the dotcom boom before the crash cut demand and it was taken private for £58m in 2005. The business returned to the stock market two years later.

Two years ago Dr Kelly set up another data centre business called DataCentred which offers data storage and cloud computing services that enable clients to access programs and data over the internet instead of from a computer hard drive.

An increasing number of business are expected to move their systems into the cloud in the next few years, and Dr Kelly expects the cloud to become for more complex. He believes the field is still a “blank page” and predicts clouds will become more sophisticated and communicate with each other.

“I worked in IT services at the university and met the early UK internet community,” said Dr Kelly. “It became obvious there was interest in providing a data centre to these users, so I resigned from the university and set up Telecity.

“I expected it to become big because there was no provision there at all. I thought it would be bigger. It’s such an important service and because it’s so fundamental to the way the internet works I knew that if we got out there we could build a very strong position. And that’s what we’ve started to do with the cloud now.”

He added: “I’m very proud of what we did at Telecity because it helped the internet grow. Hopefully we’re going to do something equally significant and interesting with DataCentred for the cloud side of the internet which I think is an extraordinarily blank page.

“Clouds allow you to do complicated things, you can structure very complicated programmes using clouds and in fact we’re starting to see clouds talk to clouds, as a machine to machine interaction.

“You can get well structured clouds which can be operating in a trading exchange between retailers and suppliers so you can get quite complicated structures where a lot of machines are talking to each other at the same time through the structure of the cloud.

“That’s not really been done yet but clouds make it possible and let you make quite complicated interactions in a short period of time. For example, the BBC broadcasts using traditional masts but they’re moving towards using the internet and using elements of the cloud for parts of the processing. But you could imagine a structure around a single cloud that could handle all of the output.”

Earlier this year DataCentred secured £4m from a group of investors including venture capitalist Jon Moulton, the North West Fund and the Greater Manchester Investment Fund. It has a base a MediaCityUK and has just signed up to the 60,000 sq ft data centre space at The Sharp Project in east Manchester.

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