NextDC’s Steve Martin to leave the data centre provider

After 11 years with NextDC, head of sales major markets Australia, Steve Martin, will be hanging up his hat at the data centre provider, towards the end of July.

He started with NextDC as the general manager national partnership strategy in March 2014, before moving to the head of channels in 2016.

During his time in his channel roles, Martin was responsible for growing the company’s channel program and working on “significant enterprise deals”.

“Every other data centre provider in the market would be squeezing a partner out and taking those deals direct,” he said. “Without disclosing intimate details, we have a good number of deals that are over $100,000 a month on partner paper.

“There’s an important reason for that. Customers don’t typically go out to market to buy data centre. They go out to buy transformation… that’s data centre, cloud migration, managed services, network integration and configuration.”

Martin said there’s a whole stack of services that a customer does in an IT or a data centre transformation project.

“We do a very core part of that, but it’s our partners that add value to that stack and make it compelling as a total solution for customers,” he said. “That’s a couple of things that I’m proud of.”

Since 2023 Martin has been running enterprise, government and partner engagement throughout New South Wales, Victoria and Australian Capital Territory, as head of sales major markets Australia.

“We’ve had a significant number of successes there,” he said. “We’ve had solid growth in the business, and we’ve got a team that is working incredibly well with each other…both enterprise and partner people.

“The overall hum of the business, if I can use that as a technical term, I think, is better than it ever has been.”

This will top off his time at the data centre provider, which Martin said started as a small, ambitious startup. At the time, it had just five data centres and 48 megawatts (MW) of total capacity.

It has now grown into 17 operational data centres, with another 10 in planning or development, with a combined 1,600MW of planned capacity under the supervision of CEO Craig Scroggie.

As for his next move, Martin has decided to take a month or two off and look for something in the September–October timeframe, perhaps in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

“Right now, I have a very strong focus or interest in AI. We’ve got a lot of AI customers at NextDC [and] I’ve seen a lot of what’s happening there.”

However, Martin said the enterprise AI space was where he was at “sitting right now” however he was cautious because he could “end up in something completely different”.

If it were to be in AI, it would be with an organisation that was “driving advancement in enterprise workloads” and doing things with AI that have not “been possible before within corporate Australia”.

“I’m genuinely buoyed or strengthened by the opportunity ahead,” Martin said. “For example, a friend of mine was having a number of difficulties just with various things in life, and she told me that she’s been seeing a therapist every day.

“I thought, that’s great and her therapist was ChatGPT.”

He noted his friend couldn’t financially afford to see a professional every single day, there was technology available that was accessible for her needs.

“For those that can afford services to go and do things, they will continue to do that,” he said. “But bringing important life skills to everybody, for me, was something I had never thought of until I was talking with [my friend].

Martin balanced view of AI compute with the fact that NextDC has a “strong sustainability team” within the business.

Just last week NextDC’s M2 data centre was one of “the first data centre in Asia Pacific to receive the Uptime Institute Sustainability Assessment Award”, he said.

It’s achievements like these that Martin said have made him “incredibly proud” of what the company has accomplished over the past 15 years, 11 of which he was part of.

“I’m going to remain a very strong shareholder because I’m incredibly confident for what lies ahead,” he said. “I see continued growth and expansion, both in Australia and, as has been announced, overseas.

For Martin, leaving the data centre provider was about “getting towards the end” of his “ability to learn, grow, and make a difference to the company”.

While he currently was still in the office regularly, Martin said he will miss the day-to-day interactions with his NextDC colleagues.

“I’ve got at least a dozen colleagues who have also spent 10 years at NextDC,” he said. “I’ve got colleagues from companies, four or five colleagues, four or five jobs ago, that I’m still close with,” he said. “This industry, this community, is a very small, tight-knit community.

“I have no doubt that I will bump into many people through the next iteration of what I do.”

The industry, according to Martin, was all about talking to people, having conversations, understanding people’s challenges or what they’re trying to achieve.

“I’m there to be called upon if anybody wants to ask a question of me,” he said. “I’ve had a couple of dozen calls [since departure announcement] from friends that saw the news.

“Just to reconnect with people that you haven’t spoken to for a while is… it’s very, very cathartic.”