Data Centers: The Next Generation

Sharif Metwalli Chief Financial Officer Vantage Data Centers

Serving as chief financial officer at Vantage Data Centers, Sharif Metwalli is responsible for driving Vantage’s strategic financing solutions for organic growth and market expansion globally. He oversees finance, accounting, financial planning and analysis, investor relations, capital markets planning, and corporate administration. With more than 20 years of experience, Metwalli is essential to accelerating Vantage’s growth, profitability and shareholder value.

With expertise in navigating strong capital markets and complex M&A transactions, Metwalli has been instrumental in the execution of Vantage’s growth and was the architect of the successful 10-figure debt and equity financing needed to fund the development of multiple hyperscale data center campuses in different markets simultaneously.

Prior to joining Vantage, Metwalli served as managing director at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey with clients in the data center and communications sectors. He focused on executing debt and equity financings as well as M&A transactions totaling over $37.5 billion in value between 2015 and 2017. Before SunTrust, Metwalli served as a director at Wells Fargo Securities.

Jon Mauck Managing Director Digital Colony

Jon Mauck is a Managing Director at Digital Colony. Mauck has 20 years of experience investing in, advising and operating communications infrastructure businesses. Mauck leads the data center investment strategy at Digital Colony and is responsible for the identification, evaluation, consummation, and management of new investments in the data center sector on a global basis.

Previously, Mauck was a partner in IO Data Centers, a privately held data center company, that developed and operated over 1.5 million square feet of data center space across North America, Europe, and Asia. Mauck was also a Managing Director and the Global Head of the Technology Infrastructure group at Citigroup’s Investment Bank.

Mauck currently serves on the Board of Directors of Vantage North America, Vantage Europe and Scala Data Centers.

Joseph Valenti Managing Director - Head of Telecommunications Group PJ SOLOMON

Joseph Valenti is a leading telecommunications investment banker with more than 20 years of experience across various products and subsectors. He advises clients on mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, public and private equity and debt capital financings and restructurings.

Prior to joining PJ SOLOMON, Valenti was Head of Americas Telecom at Barclays. There, he was responsible for covering many of the firm’s key wireless and wireline telecom service providers, and developed a particular expertise advising communications infrastructure and cloud service providers. Before Barclays, Valenti spent 10 years at Lehman Brothers, most recently serving as the Head of TMT within Global Finance.

Over the course of Valenti’s career, he has been actively involved with more than $300 billion of transactions and has advised on a number of notable deals. Selected recent M&A transactions include the strategic growth capital investment by Mubadala into Cologix; the sale of Netrality to Macquarie Infrastructure Partners in partnership with management; the acquisition of a majority stake in Teraco by Berkshire Partners; the sale of Datapipe to Rackspace; the sale of KIO Networks’ fiber assets to American Tower; the acquisition of Vodafone’s 45% stake in Verizon Wireless by Verizon; the sale of Cologix to Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners; the sale of Telx to Digital Realty; the acquisition of Earthlink by Windstream; the sale of Telecity to Equinix; and the acquisition of AboveNet by Zayo.