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Shalini Lagrutta boasts a remarkable 20-year track record in the telecoms and data centre industry. Her journey includes pivotal roles in renowned companies such as Fujitsu Telecommunications, Huawei, LGC Wireless in Silicon Valley, and Flexenclosure. Notably, Shalini’s leadership at DXN since 2019 has propelled significant sales growth in Modular Data Centres. Shalini’s contribution at DXN since 2019 to 2022 was as bringing in significant customers and revenue growth to the business. Since being appointed as CEO on 2022, her focus has been to restructure the company including exiting unprofitable businesses and focusing on turning the company around to profitable growth. Recognised for her outstanding contributions, she earned accolades like Capacity Media’s 20 Women to Watch in 2020, Top 30 Edge Computing Leaders by Data Economy in 2020, and a spot-on Capacity Media’s 2021 Power 100 listing. Shalini’s recent achievement includes being honoured as one of the Infrastructure Masons (iM100) award recipients in December 2021 as well as 2024 TOP-10 APAC Women Leaders by Data Centre Magazine —a testament to her inspiring leadership in shaping the digital age.

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Alex is the Australia team lead for Cushman and Wakefield’s Asia Pacific Data Centre Advisory Team (DCAT). He specialises in data centre transaction advice with over 20 years of experience in real estate advisory services.

He has transacted in excess of AUD$1BN on behalf of hyperscalers, colo operators, developers and government clients. His previous engagements have included acquisitions, capital raising, development management, leasing and divestment.

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As Co-Founder and CEO, Darren’s role is to ensure that Evolution Data Centres delivers on its strategic vision to become the leading pan-Asian data centre platform, delivering digital growth, reliably and sustainably, into high growth markets (often referred to as Tier 2 markets). Evolution are actively developing projects today, across the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Darren’s career spans the full breadth of the digital infrastructure ecosystem, including Telco, Data Centre and Artificial Intelligence. Darren was the Asia Managing Director for IO Data Centres, where he had overall leadership for a modular-designed data center in Singapore. Darren led this business to net cash flow positive and ultimately to a successful exit.

In his time in telco, Darren delivered significant investment programmes, with budgets of over £500m, while leading Vodafone’s strategic investments across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Part of this role included Darren establishing the Vodafone Enterprise brand in the UAE. Prior to Vodafone, Darren was MD of Cable & Wireless for Asia, in addition to running their Global Enterprise sales channel, a business delivering annualised revenue of over £240m.

Along with his Evolution Fo-founder and team, Darren is passionate about culture in the workplace. He aspires for Evolution to be an organization where everyone is a driver and there are no passengers. All the team are responsible for moving Evolution forward every day in the right direction, he encourages all the team to take ownership and accountability. He is often heard saying and reminding himself, to enjoy the journey, rather than being obsessed with the destination.

Sustainability is a cornerstone of Darren’s approach, his goal is to drive change in the industry to deliver greener data centres (he doesn’t agree with, or like, the phrase “green data centres”). This ambition is brought to life in Evolution where every effort is made to minimize the environmental impact of every data center project that the company develops.

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