Speakers 2022
Henna Virkkunen
Member of the European Parliament
Henna Virkkunen is a Finnish Member of the European Parliament and a member of its largest political group, the EPP. In the European Parliament, she is a member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) and the Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN).
She has previously served as a member of the Parliament of Finland, and as minister of education, local government and transport.
Virpi Mäkinen
Enterprise Architect, MBA, Finnish Government ICT Centre Valtori
Virpi Mäkinen works for the Customer Experience at Finnish Government ICT Centre Valtori. Her main responsibilities focus on ensuring customers’ needs are forwarded to service design and development. She has also worked as the Head of Architecture Unit for both business areas (Common Non-Business Related Services and Security Network). Valtori’s current interest areas look to cloud services, on the other hand security (especially cyber security) form a self-evident core of the whole business. Mäkinen also participates as Valtori’s representative in Euritas Joint Advisory Group (European Association of Public ICT Service Providers).
Mäkinen started Enterprise Architecture work for the City of Vantaa 2012-2017. She worked for the Finnish Board of Customs over a decade and played a key role in standardizing Cross-Border Regulatory Agencies data and integration globally. Mäkinen has also worked for private logistic companies and a conglomerate corporation.
Peter Jaspers
Partner, Bergmann Attorneys at Law
Peter Jaspers advises domestic and international clients in their business transactions in Finland. With his result-oriented mindset and extensive experience in cross-border business, Peter is a trusted partner for companies that need to get things done.
Peter has special strengths in M&A and financing transactions. He also has a strong track record in supporting bidders in public procurement procedures and advises our industry clients in their day-to-day corporate matters.
Mirva Antila
CEO, DigiFinland Oy
Mirva Antila has extensive experience of leadership and organisational development roles in the fields of digitalisation and technology. She finds the many advantages and opportunities offered by these areas, such as improved customer experiences, especially inspiring. Antila considers the significance of diverse teams as an obvious resource for the development of digital services, and empowering such teams is at the core of her leadership and management work. Antila sees the safe utilisation of data as one of the major social focal points of promoting digitalisation.
Ville Sirviö
CEO, Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS)
Ville Sirviö is the CEO of the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), a non-profit developing digital government infrastructure, best known for the X-Road® software. Having international experience in leading businesses ranging from start-ups to Nasdaq listed companies, he is also a board professional and advisor and keynote speaker on cross-border digital cooperation.
Henry Kylänlahti
CISO, Apotti Oy
Henry Kylänlahti works for Oy Apotti Ab as CISO. He has extensive experience of information and cyber security in telecommunications, banking & finance, retail and public sector.
Jerri Loikkanen
Managing Director, Neoen Finland
Jerri Loikkanen is the Managing Director of Neoen in Finland. He has extensive experience from the Finnish energy sector. Neoen is one of the world’s leading independent producers of exclusively renewable energy.
Nina Nissilä
Deputy Director General, Kela (Social Insurance Institution of Finland)
Nina Nissilä works as a Deputy Director General in Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. She is in charge of IT and Shares Services.
Customer centric digitalization, innovation and business development are close to Nissilä’s heart. Previously she has established a service design oriented digital team for Finnish Government and worked as a business lead in CGI and Tieto.
Juhani Eronen
Chief Specialist, National Cyber Security Centre Finland
Juhani “Jussi” Eronen has worked at the National Cyber Security Center since 2006, with various responsibilities related to vulnerabilities, incidents and information assurance. In recent years, the focus of his work has shifted to researching and ensuring the security of future technologies. His background is in software vulnerability testing and dependency analysis in the OUSPG group of the University of Oulu.
Peter Lund
Professor, Aalto University Advanced Energy Systems
Dr. Peter D. Lund is Professor in Engineering Physics and Advanced Energy Systems at Aalto University, Finland. He has held visiting positions in China and Germany. He is Honorary Professor at Southeast University (Nanjing). He has over 40 years of experience in clean energy technologies, systems, and policies. He led Finland’s R&D programme on new energy technologies (TEKES) 1988-1998. Dr. Lund is active in senior roles with European Union initiatives in energy: he chaired the Advisory Group Energy of the European Commission 2002-2006 and the Energy Steering Panel of European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) 2013-2017, Co-Chair of European Academies’ Science to Policy support (SAPEA) on Systemic Approach to the Energy Transition in Europe 2019-2021, member in Euro-CASE energy group 2013-2017.
He is vice-chair of the Finnish Climate Panel advising Ministries 2020-2023. He is member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and Swedish Engineering Academy in Finland, Co-Editor-in-Chief for Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment, Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Open Energy, member of several editorial boards. He has been internationally awarded, lastly with the Jiangsu Friendship Award and Medal (2020). His doctoral degree is from Helsinki University of Technology (1984); London Business School Alumni (1989).
Kari Koivisto
CEO, Kuulea Energia Oy
Kari Koivisto is the founder and CEO of a sustainable datacenter startup company called Kuulea Energia Oy, that utilizes the waste heat of the data centers in a green and innovative way.
Kari has many years of experience in business and service development on global and local ICT companies, and he a founder of two startups. Things that drive Kari at heart are circular economy and the practical applications of green technology.
Mika Linna
Head of Financial Crime and Cybersecurity, Finance Finland
Mika Linna, LLM, CISM, CISSP, CIPP/E, CIPM is the Head of Financial Crime and Cybersecurity for Finance Finland and has over 30 years of risk management experience in the financial services industry. Before joining Finance Finland, Mika has held senior advisory positions in Operational Risk and Information Security Management at Nordea Group, Aktia Financial Group and KPMG Finland. He is the current chair of the European Banking Federation’s Anti-Money Laundering and Financial Crime Expert Group and an active member of the anti-money laundering, financial crime and cybersecurity related working groups at the European Banking Federation, Insurance Europe, European Fund and Asset Management Association, and European Payments Council.
Jon Summers
Scientific lead in data centres, RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden)
Dr Jon Summers is the scientific lead in data centres at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Adjunct Professor in Fluid Mechanics at Lulea Technical University in Sweden, and a Visiting Professor to the Institute of Thermofluids at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has worked on government and industry funded projects using high performance computing (HPC). Having built and managed compute intense clusters to support research projects, he chaired the HPC User Group for 20 years at the University of Leeds. Recently Jon’s research has focused on a range of thermal management and energy flow projects within the Data Centre, HVAC, and industrial sectors. Since 2011 he has been involved in liquid cooled IT research projects, focusing both at the data centre and the microprocessor scales, which has been further transformed by opportunities of integrated digital infrastructure research at RISE, including the operation of large-scale testbeds. Focusing on thermal and energy management has led to Jon being invited to present and sit on panels within the data centre community. Jon also has an interest in the physical limits of computation.
Toni Vartiainen
Business Director, Telia Cygate
Toni Vartiainen is an information security generalist who has worked for more than 15 years in the development of services that ensure the continuity of B2B business. Vartiainen currently works as the director of Telia Cygate’s service business and is a member of Telia Cygate’s management team. His core competencies are business-oriented preparedness for threats and information security of modern information networks.
Nick Morris
Consultant, Carbon3IT
Nick Morris (MSc DIC PhD) original technical and commercial background is in biotech, bio/chemical- engineering, modelling and sensors. He entered the data center sector via DatacenterDynamics, where he was responsible for France, Nordics and UK markets and the co-developed and worldwide rollout of CEEDA energy efficiency assessment and certification. During the coronavirus pandemic he co-founded the company Obynote to exploit verifiable credentials to provide completely private proof of an individual’s vaccination status. The same approaches were deployed to win an H2020 competition to provide immutable data provenance for engineering use-cases and now to develop applications for decentralized renewable energy generation and storage. His focus within Carbon3IT is on energy efficiency, applications of standards and in quantifying, modelling and advising on minimizing Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions and mitigating ‘carbon risk’ for leading European data center operators, the development reporting methodologies and the evaluation of beyond system boundary benefits. In collaboration with leading energy efficiency policy consultancy WSEE, he is developing analytical tools for evaluating the thermal impact of legacy carbon emissions and its implications for carbon pricing and sequestration and the requirements to attain net zero impact for lifetime carbon emissions.
Jussi Jyrinsalo
Senior Vice President, Fingrid Oyj
Jussi works in the Finnish Transmission System Operator, Fingrid Oyj as a Senior Vice President. He has been a member of the executive management group since 2005. His current areas of responsibility are customer relations and grid planning including grid connections. In addition to these duties, he acts as a convenor for both Nordic Grid Planning and Baltic Sea System Development committees and is also a member of the Finnish Energy (Energiateollisuus) Grid Committee.
Michael Winterson
Managing Director, Equinix Services
Michael Winterson joined Equinix in September 2007 through the acquisition of IXEurope. Now Managing Director for Equinix Services, in addition to being Vice President for Business Development, Michael has held many roles at the company, leading teams in aligning with Equinix’s strategy, services and innovation.
As businesses globally continue to rely upon Equinix for critical digital infrastructure needs, including the ability to leverage interconnected colocation services through virtual, as a Service and edge solutions, Michael is focused on further developing bare metal provisions.
As the data centre industry continues to expand in support of increased digital demand, Michael is spearheading efforts both within Equinix and the wider industry to review how these essential operations can be made as sustainable as possible, so as to meet this need responsibly. As part of this, Michael is Chairman of the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA), and Chair of its Policy Committee – dedicated to raising awareness of the data centre industry and its role within societies and economies, in addition to proposing regulatory initiatives. Michael is also one of the founders of the EU Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact.
Michael brings over two decades of data centre services experience and has held various senior positions in country management, sales and marketing. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and French from Northwestern University, and a Master’s Degree in International Economics from the Graduate Institute – Geneva.
Michael is also a board member of the charity group New Life Nyambene.
Henrik Hansen
CEO, Danish Data Center Industry (DDI)
CEO of the Danish Data Center Industry (DDI), with close to 100 member-companies. Henrik is responsible for the DDI operations such as membership services, networking activities, influencing the political scene and establishing the business eco system surrounding the data center industry in Denmark. DDI is also working with a wide range of partners to optimize the market and political conditions for data center investments in Denmark.
Johanna Kirkinen
Senior Engineer, Finnish Energy Authority
Johanna Kirkinen (D.Sc.(Tech)) works as a Senior Engineer at the Finnish Energy Authority. She has 18 years of working experiment from energy and environment research, development and expert tasks from both public and private sector. Currently she works with energy efficiency and ecodesign. The Finnish Energy Authority has been financing several energy efficiency indicator projects for different industries. This year Energy Efficiency of Data Centers in Finland is studied.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkinen/
Kim Gunnelius
CCO and co-founder, Ficolo Ltd
As CCO and co-founder of Ficolo, Kim drives the marketing and international sales of Ficolo’s climate neutral certified data center services. Having overseen the startup and growth phase of Ficolo as Chairman, Kim joined Ficolo full time in 2017 as CCO. In his position, he identifies and manages opportunities globally, ranging from Hyperscale and HPC to enterprise, including working with the largest technology companies in the world. He also oversaw the green certification initiatives that helped Ficolo achieve several industry firsts, such as the first Dark Green rated green bond for a data center company as well as the first hyperscale-level, climate neutral certification for a Nordic data center.
Having reached carbon neutrality in 2021, many years ahead of competing companies’ targets, Ficolo is advancing towards a carbon negative, climate-positive operation. Under Kim’s leadership, Ficolo efforts include reusing excess heat into the district heating grid to create a positive handprint in addition to a zero footprint.
With a background in software and telecom, Kim has helped build the financial foundation at Ficolo and define its position as one of the top data centers in Finland and an internationally recognized, sustainable leader in Colocation.
Henrik Børling
Business Development Director, Huawei
Business Development Director within Digital Power at Huawei, Responsible for Strategy- and Business Development together with partners, has a Master degree within IT-Leadership and Management at the IT-University of Copenhagen, with experience in all aspects of datacenter infrastructure projects. Has more than three decades experience in Project management and general technical solutions within IT, and the last thirteen years has been working within the datacenter Industry in different roles as Business Development Manager, Project Manager and Product Manager covering the main aspects for Datacenter infrastructure projects. This experience covers a wide range of datacenter installations including several turn-key solutions.
Member of the “Energy and Sustainability“ committee at the Danish Datacenter Industry
Member of the “Sustainability” committee at IT-Branchen in Denmark
Member of the global Subcommittee SC39 within ISO/IEC
Member of the national working group within EN50600
Henrietta Lahti
Business Lead, Datacenter and Waste Heat Solutions, Helen Oy
Henrietta Lahti is a skilled professional with over two decades of experience from the energy technology industry.
As a Business Lead for Helen Ltd (large energy company based in Helsinki, Finland) specialising in data centres and waste heat solutions. She is currently responsible for connecting customers, businesses, and energy companies together to provide cost effective energy solutions.
Stefan Lindström
Senior Adviser, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland
Stefan Lindström is the Finnish Foreign Services first Ambassador of Digitalization and Technology. He is a trade and networking expert with experience in branding, business promotion and building successful partnerships. His passion about emerging opportunities of technology, digital transformation and innovation and how this can benefit our society drives his work. He never accepts the world as it appears to be, and encourages everyone to dare to see what it could be.
Prior to this assignment, he worked as Consul General/Ambassador at the Finnish Consulate General in Los Angeles, as Deputy Director at the MFA in Helsinki, as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Finnish Embassies in Lisbon, Portugal and Jakarta, Indonesia. Before that, he was the adviser to the undersecretary of state at the MFA in Helsinki, Finland and served with the Finnish missions in the USA and in India.
Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Mr. Lindström worked as legal adviser for the European Commission in Brussels and as a research assistant at the London School of Economics.
Mr Lindström has a Master’s Degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and a Master’s Degree in International Law from the Åbo Akademi University.
Andreas Espeving
Senior Account Manager, Vattenfall
Andreas Espeving is a Senior Account Manager from Vattenfall and has more than 20 years experience from the Nordic electricity market. From 2013 he has worked with supplying renewable energy to data centers in the Nordics. His experience ranges from working with small purpose built data centers to hyperscalers. During these years Andreas has been involved in supplying flexibility services to the TSOs from data centers, heat recycling and matching solutions for renewable energy and electricity consumption (24/7) .
Satu Merenheimo
C&SP Segment Leader Finland, Schneider Electric
Satu Merenheimo is an IT professional with over 20 years of experience in the IT -field. Currently Satu oversees Cloud Service Provider Segment as the Head of the department in Finland. Previously Satu has worked for example as Sales Director for Secure Power division in Finland & Baltics and as a segment leader for Data Center & IT Channel.
Satu’s extensive expertise and knowledge in the field combined with her passion for driving Data Center segment to a more sustainable, efficient, and economical future making her a trusted partner among the many stakeholders she works with.
Bjørn Rønning
CEO, Norwegian Data Center Industry
Bjørn Rønning is the CEO of the Norwegian Data Center Industry, a trade association which was recently established and now is the voice of the data center industry in Norway. Mr. Ronning is a subject matter expert on internet infrastructure, and has through his career worked as an advisor in the national and international digital infrastructure space.
Jussi Vihersalo
Manager, Business Development, Critical Power Solutions EMEA, Eaton
Jussi Vihersalo is leading Business Development for Critical Power Solutions for Eaton EMEA. Based in Espoo, Finland, Jussi specializes in large UPS system solutions for mission critical applications and Grid Support/Demand response/energy storage usecases with UPS products.
He has more than 15 years of experience with low and medium voltage power distribution systems and protection in mission critical applications plus energy markets and has been working in different technical sales, marketing and business development roles in power distribution and datacenter industry. Jussi holds a M.Sc. In Power Engineering from Tampere University of Technology.
Johann Thor Jonsson
Director, Project Management and Business Development, atNorth
Johann is the Director of Project Management and Business Development at atNorth, where he is responsible for the provision of day-to-day operations and strategic implementation of best practices and standards across atNorth’s pan-Nordic data center sites. Johann has extensive experience in site selection and project management and has played a leading role in the design, development and construction of atNorth’s energy efficient data centers in Iceland and Sweden since 2014.
Johann has decades of experience in the industry, having been part of the original management team at atNorth for the past five years. Johann has been at the forefront of datacenter operations since 2011. Prior to joining atNorth, he worked for Advania as Operations Manager overseeing strategic business initiatives to bring several of its acquired companies across the Nordic region together into one successful entity.
Johann also served as the Chairman of the Board for Data Center Iceland (DCI) between 2016-2021. The DCI was formed to support the growth of the datacenter industry in Iceland through strategic initiatives to increase awareness and increasing importance of the industry across the Nordics.
Antti Poikola
Senior Lead and Data Architecture Specialist, Sitra’s Gaia-X Finland project
Antti “Jogi” Poikola is an active and networked expert and promoter of the people-oriented data economy in Finland and internationally. As Senior Lead and Data Architecture Specialist in Sitra’s Gaia-X Finland project, Jogi’s work focuses on bringing Finnish expertise into the development of the European data space. He also works to ensure that Finnish data sharing networks have an up-to-date view of the kinds of technological solutions that are viable and interoperable now and in the future.
Lars Schedin
Senior Advisor, EcoDataCenter
Co-founded EcoDataCenter 2016, and acted as CEO until 2021.
Today Senior Advisor focused on marketing, funding and sustainability.
Before EcoDC I have been acting as advisor to private equity firms in different industries. My last position as an employee was as SVP at Electrolux Group.
Living in Stockholm, married and got three daughters and a German Shepard.
Pekka Järveläinen
Principal consultant, Justin Group Oy
Pekka Järveläinen is Principal consultant at Justin and member of the board at Finnish Data Center Forum, FDCF. He is an experienced all round IT service management leader who has been in charge of strategic IT projects and producing service business for various ICT sector customers. He has long experience in cloud and data center business as CEO and in IT and telecom as head of development . He has been working in the data centers’ energy efficiency standardization on global level. Currently he is working with high growth service companies and specializes in cyber security.
Janna Salokangas
International host & entrepreneur
Janna is a global host and entrepreneur hosting high level events around the world bringing the right people together to the right place at the right time.
As a people person Janna understands the power of human connection. She has a dynamic, empathic and natural sensibility that makes her a fascinating presenter.
Reidar Wasenius
Author, Educator, Business Developer
Reidar Wasenius is one of the top speakers and moderators in Finland. He is an experienced professional in communications and business development. He has been working in the tech sector since 1984 and his past employers include Samsung,
Nokia (twice), Digital Equipment Corporation and the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation TEKES (now: Business Finland).
Reidar was the Managing Director of the Finnish Business Angels Network (FiBAN) 2017-2019 and is now the Chief Creative Officer of Breaks Finland Ltd. Reidar has the Finnish voice heard by more people than any other one. It can be heard in telecom operator messages in Finnish phone networks since 1992, in the public announcements on board Finnish trains since 2014 and in the automated telephone services of many government agencies, municipalities and cities throughout Finland.
Veijo Terho
Chairman of the FDCF Board
Veijo Terho has long career in datacenter business sector and now working in Ficolo Ltd as Customer Success Director.
Experiences in Public Sector and private owned companies like Telia, Tieto and Nokia have contained multiple data center projects around Scandinavia to either build or renovate existing data centers in service owner, customer and technical specialist roles. Energy saving and recycling has been close to heart when looking this business sector services.
Mikko Aho
Member of the FDCF Board
Mikko is a data center professional who has been working in the industry for more than 10 years. Recently he has been focusing to the Edge development and also to the improvement of the energy efficiency in data centers and specially the heat recovery from the DC facilities to surrounding ecosystems. Mikko is leading the Rittal IT sales and solutions department in Finland and is also a board member in the Finnish Data Center Forum and Chairman of the finish ISO standardization working group for resource efficient data centers.
Eero Lindqvist
Member of the FDCF Board
Eero Lindqvist has over 30 year experience of IT business both from the customer and supplier side including hardware, software and IT-services. He has been also involved in Telia Helsinki Data Center project from the very beginning mostly in business development, but also in technology, energy efficiency and sustainability matters. He retired from permanent work in spring 2022 but is still active in the data center field and in Finnish Data Center Forum.