Peter Hannaford

Peter Hannaford, Senior Partner at Portman, a boutique senior-level search firm for the data center industry, has been involved with computers and data centers for over 50 years. Starting as a computer operator, he worked his way up to found Waterfields, growing it to become one of the biggest datacenter design and build companies in Europe. From there he started Tecnikon, a firm that designed and patented the first water-cooled server rack with an integrated vertical cooling coil for high-density computing. Tecnikon was sold to APC in 2003 after which APC was acquired by Schneider Electric. Hannaford worked at Schneider until 2010 leaving to found DataCenter People where he remained until founding Portman in 2018.