Datacenter firms Elea, Scala expand management, operations teams

Two major datacenter service providers in Latin America are making changes to their executive teams as part of their push to continue growing in the region.

Elea Digital, controlled by Brazilian asset management group Piemonte Holding, announced two new names for its executive board.

Frank Hasset was appointed as senior consultant to the management board, while Crislaine Corradine was appointed as supply chain director. 

Piemonte CEO Alessandro Lombardi (pictured) said that Hasset and Corradine are "important additions" to support the company's growth plan.

"Our platform revenue is increasing organically at a 20% pace in the first semester of FY22. We have no significant churn, existing clients grow power consumption and new clients are joining, at any location (Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Brasilia, other than Rio and São Paulo)," the executive told BNamericas.

Both of the executives came from US interconnection giant Equinix. Hasset was datacenter infrastructure VP at Equinix Europe and Corradine was the supply chain chief at Equinix LatAm. Prior to working for Equinix, Corradine led the supply department at UOLDiveo, a company later bought by Scala Data Centers.

In April, Elea announced that it was adding two new members to its board: Guy Willner, founder of IXEurope, acquired by Equinix in 2007; and Tesh Durvasula, former CEO of CyrusOne, bought last March by KKR and GIP.

Lombardi said Elea has managed to achieve "timely delivery" of new capacity in the different metropolitan areas in which it operates, with no delays, despite the challenging global logistics bottleneck in equipment shipping.

"Crislaine Corradine, arguably one of the most known buyers in the LatAm data center industry, will handle and boost the speed of our supply chain," said Lombardi.

Lombardi said that because Piemonte/Elea expects to continue growing both organically and non-organically at the same pace as previous years, it is essential to reinforce its executive team.

SCALA

DigitalBridge's Scala Data Centers has hired Ana Paula Romantini as new CFO, replacing Serafim de Abreu Junior. She will lead the financial area in the company's next investment cycle. 

Prior to joining Scala, Romantini worked for 13 years at Santo Antônio Energia, the concessionaire responsible for the implementation and operation of the Santo Antônio hydroelectric dam, the fourth largest in Brazil, having led the utility's financial, investor relations, IT and supply chain areas.

Romantini reports directly to CEO Marcos Peigo.

“Ana joins a first-rate team and her vast experience in structuring complex financial operations, based on solid compliance principles, is key to the success of this new stage of the company,” Peigo said in a statement.

DigitalBridge has about US$50bn of assets including co-investments, debt issuance and related financing formats under its control, and it plans to invest US$800mn in Scala. 

Last December IFC announced a US$75mn investment to be split between DigitalBridge's Highline and Scala.

Scala is also planning sites in Mexico, Chile and Colombia with 32MW each, to be launched by the end of 2023, when the company expects to reach total installed capacity of around 340MW for all its Latin American datacenters.

Meanwhile, Digital Realty’s Ascenty, the biggest datacenter colocation company in Latin America, announced new positions for Brazil.

The company aims to hire 25 professionals for operations in the metropolitan regions of Campinas and Santo André, São Paulo state.

In Hortolândia, part of the Campinas area, where Ascenty has four operating datacenters and two under construction, the company is seeking 22 professionals, including electrical and refrigeration analysts and operations coordinators.

Ascenty has 28 datacenters in operation and under construction in Brazil, Chile and Mexico. It pledged investments of 1.35bn reais (US$261mn) this year in the construction and expansion of sites, up from 1.2bn reais in 2021.