Kao Data has appointed a new CEO to help lead the six-year-old company through its next stage of growth and expansion.
Lee Myall, who most recently served as chief commercial officer at Epsilon, a cloud and fabric connectivity platform, will step into the role of CEO, allowing Paul Finch to step down immediately from being interim CEO and serve as Kao Data’s chief operating officer.
Myall’s appointment comes at a crucial time for Kao Data, which is preparing for the second construction phase of its £230 million Harlow campus development. The company is hoping to tap into his expertise, which includes commercial leadership experience along with strategic management of high growth, scale-up environments and business transformation strategies.
David Bloom, Kao Data board member and partner at investment firm Goldacre-Noé Group, said, “On behalf of the Board, we are delighted to be welcoming Lee to the company as our new CEO. Lee joins Kao Data at an exciting time and his impressive track record in corporate and commercial management provides Kao Data with the perfect leadership to drive our next phase of growth.”
“The Board wishes to thank Paul for his phenomenal contribution to the company as interim-CEO and with the executive team complete, Paul is now able to fully focus as our COO – spearheading Kao Data’s operational and technical expansion to meet our accelerated customer demands.”
Myall’s earlier career includes responsibility for overseeing the success of SaaS provider WAM!NET in Europe, leading to its acquisition by SAVVIS in 2003, as well as the inception and delivery of a complex solutions division at Interoute, one of Europe’s largest independent fibre networks and cloud networking platforms. Whilst there, Lee pioneered its IaaS/cloud computing business units and was responsible for handling large-scale, blue chip digital transformation projects. Together, this helped grow the Interoute business to €750M and contributed to its successful sale in a $2.3BN acquisition by GTT in 2018.
“The team at Kao Data have an outstanding reputation within the industry and I’m delighted to have joined as their new CEO,” said Myall.
“The importance of mission-critical digital infrastructure to industry, business and society has never been more paramount. I’m excited to be part of Kao Data’s strong and dynamic leadership team, and with a perfectly aligned commercial strategy, we are on track to become the UK’s preeminent provider of advanced colocation for high performance computing, artificial intelligence and enterprise.”
