The Data Center Exchange | S1 Ep 3

By Del Connolly

12 Jun 2023

3 min read

How can organizational culture impact high performance? with Chris Yetman

Welcome to The Data Center Exchange Podcast with host Del Connolly, Global Director of Harper Harrison, a built environment recruiting firm as he is joined by some of the most senior leaders within the data center industry. Del and his guests will be touching on topics such as the culture of a fast-growing business within the sector, sustainability, engineering, construction challenges, diversity & inclusion, and much more.

We are delighted to be joined by Chris Yetman. Chris is the COO of Vantage Data Centers, one of the fastest-growing organizations within the sector. I wanted to discuss how organizational culture impacts the high performance and growth of a business. Particularly a business operating to such high standards expected within the Data Center market. Chris talks us through his personal journey and offers us an insight into the success of Vantage, the mindset and approach to customer engagement. This is a rare opportunity to gain an insight into what is one of the industry's success stories.

As Chief Operating Officer at Vantage Data Centers, Chris Yetman leads operations, security, construction, design, engineering and IT. Yetman is dedicated to building a culture of operational excellence and constant improvement by focusing on transparency and performance measurements and applying lessons learned to Vantage’s next generation of data centers.

With more than 30 years of experience, Yetman approaches strategy and decision-making from the customers’ viewpoint. In partnership with Vantage’s leadership team, he develops the company’s strategy and evangelizes it throughout the organization. Yetman has been instrumental in accelerating Vantage’s growth from a regional data center provider in the United States to a fast-growing global operator.

Prior to joining Vantage, Yetman served as vice president of infrastructure operations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he was responsible for managing the operations of the company’s data centers worldwide. At AWS, he achieved 99.9% availability of servers, reduced the data center operations ticket backlog by 76%, decreased the mean time-to-repair by 56%, and enhanced provisioning performance by 50% for 95% of all servers. Before this, Yetman managed the daily operations of one of the largest fiber and TCP/IP networks in the world at Level 3 Communications. Yetman received his Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from Northeastern University.