**Title: Telecom Interviews with Sujit Panda, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for BDX**
**Description:**
Welcome to JSA TV – The Newsroom for Telecom and data center professionals. In this interview, Barb Mitchell speaks with Sujit Panda, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for BDX. They discuss pressing issues in the telecom industry, including sustainability and skill set challenges. Sujit also shares how BDX is tackling these issues through partnerships and a focus on diversity and inclusion. Watch now to gain insights into the innovative practices of this technology company.
**Keywords/Tags:**
Telecom interviews, Telecommunications interviews, Technology Interviews, Executive telecom discussion, Executive telecom interview, Executive technology interview, c-level interviews, c-level telecom interviews, c-level technology interviews, Tech company innovators, Technology company innovators, Technology company network business, Data Management Services, Technology Company, Innovative Technology, Technology video, Technology videos, JSA TV, JSATV
**Transcript:**
*[Foreign](source_1)* Welcome to JSA TV – The Newsroom for Telecom and data center professionals. I’m Barb Mitchell, joining you today live from day three of the Data Cloud Global Congress. Joining me is **Sujit Panda**, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for BDX. Thank you for joining us, Sujit.
Thank you, Barb, and thank you for having us here. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, and this is just a reiteration of all that we do, just to get our name and our customers to know what we are doing in the market.
Yeah, I know it’s always great catching up with you. There’s always a lot happening with BDX, and I know this week has been busy. We appreciate you making the time. I know it was a juggle to fit everything you wanted into this week. How’s it been for you? You’ve had a lot of great conversations.
Great, I mean it’s always great to be in Data Cloud. It’s one of the events that we like a lot. We get to see a lot of our customers, we get to see a lot of our peers, we get to see a lot of the thought leadership that happens around here. So that’s been a great thing, and yeah, it’s a little tiring, the juggle is a little tiring, but I feel really excited about this. A lot of energy keeps us going, right?
Yeah, and as you have been going through your conversations this week, what do you feel are some of the most pressing issues that have been coming up?
I think the big piece that we’re seeing here, let’s say, for example, near home Netherlands, if I look at Apex Singapore, all the times, all the places, we’re seeing that sustainability and the way we look at power usage is one of the big pieces. Everybody is trying to see when you build a data center, how energy efficient you’re going to build it. There are new norms around it. The second piece is that you don’t get power very easily, so you have to prove what pieces you’re going to do to ensure that you have the most sustainable power usage. That’s one of the pressing issues around sustainability. Then you also have a challenge around skill sets, human capital. It’s going to be challenging, and it’s not going to solve as easily. You really have to do a lot of heavy lifting about training skill sets, competency, and so on and so forth in each of the local regions that you’re working in. That’s the other challenge that we see.
I couldn’t agree more. Both of those topics in different ways have been coming up in a lot of discussions with our clients and the industry. Sustainability, of course, such a big topic. We’re the industry’s growing so quickly, but how are we doing it in a sustainable way? And to your second point, how do we build the teams and the skills to support the industry? So, how’s BDX specifically as you continue to expand? How are you tackling some of those?
In BDX, we’ve been really lucky. We’ve been backed by partners, and our shareholders have been amazingly good in terms of looking at sustainability. I score Capital has one of the largest sustainability portfolios, six gigawatts plus. That’s been a good thing to learn from them. The other piece is that we are also trying to do Academia partnerships to look at ways and means to think and make things much more sustainable. We have invested with NUS, the National University of Singapore. We have invested with a lot of academia in India. We are investing now with academia in Hong Kong. We’re trying to see how do we bring all of that into a data center practice. It’s been a great partnership with a lot of the common bodies also supporting us in these initiatives. That’s one on the sustainability side. Again, on the skill set side, while internally learning and development is one piece of it, we also are looking at a lot of diversity and inclusion to help us bring in talent from outside and then train and retain them. Diversity has helped us, and inclusion has actually helped us retain talent. The management team specifically believes that if you can have a diverse thought process and encourage it, and you’re more inclusive, people will stay on with you. So that’s been a great thing. These are the two things that we’re trying to do from an industry perspective, going and talking about these things and trying to see how do we bring more people along.
That’s great. It’s always great to hear from you, Sujit, and from BDX in general. I know I wanted to ask, you had, like, it was last year that you relocated to Singapore, and how’s that been for you making that move?
I have not relocated because I haven’t been BDX. BDX has relocated. It’s been a great move. I think it’s a brilliant place to be in APAC. I see the Singapore government being very, very supportive of local companies. The Singapore government also is, you know, amongst the best, from a thought leadership perspective, in trying to push sustainability, green data centers. In spite of the fact that it’s the wrong place to do solar or to do wind, they simply don’t have the land, but the thought leadership is amazing in terms of how do you do grids with different other countries, how do you propagate renewables and put it on an international grid. So, I kind of love the thought leadership that they’re bringing into the region.
Great partnerships, as you’ve already spoken to, those have come out of that move. So, yeah, thank you. I just wanted to ask about that. I was more curious than anything. But for the next 12 months or so, what’s on the horizon? What are you most focused on?
We’re focused on a lot of expansions. Obviously, because of NDA-based reasons, I cannot go and talk about that, but we are now moving. The big piece is that we’ve grown very fast in three years. We’ve been in four countries, 12 data centers, and nearly around 30 megawatts of power operational. Suffice to say, we should…
*Note: This transcript has been edited for readability and clarity.*
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