I’m once again overnighting in Brick Lane. It seems to have been a theme this year as I visit new venues in my role as datacentre and cloud reporter. I have grown to appreciate this bit of inner east London in ways I did not when I lived south of the river in the 1990s. The social mix, the shops, the history that sits in street names and on the facade of many buildings, the curry houses and beigel bakeries, remnants of the rag trade beside phone repair counters, all of it stacked against brick that has seen a dozen different Londons.
This morning I wake too early, with a million ideas turning in my head. I write notes, fire off emails, get breakfast and head for Tobacco Dock to attend Everpure Accelerate London.
I’m early, and shepherded to the coffee stand in the open-air central courtyard. Above me, the sky. Just in front of me, the old wooden roof – a cantilevered, half-glazed, labyrinthine framework. The coffee is welcome, and I stand beneath early blue skies and cool down from the 15-minute walk on a surprisingly warm morning.
Around me gather other early starters – mostly Everpure people, a few keen partners and consultants, one or two obvious geeks who might be happier facing a dark mode code editor than actual people. This is the cast of a technology event in 2026 – the partners, the executives, the geeks, the lifers, the drivers, the pushers, the welcomers, the facilitators. Some dress up, some do not, a few just a little over the top.
A fortress for a leaf
The building around us carries its own credentials. Tobacco Dock began life as a bonded warehouse. Daniel Asher Alexander, a prison architect, designed its high, fortress-like perimeter walls. Tobacco and imported spirits carried heavy duties as taxed luxuries, so the whole site doubled as a vault against smugglers and river thieves. The walls rise high and blank. Storage has always had a security problem.
It is also a problem of fragility. Tobacco leaf is hygroscopic: it drinks moisture from the air. Too damp, and the leaf breeds mould and rots. Too dry, and it loses its oils, turns brittle, and shatters to dust. So the builders raised great brick-and-timber warehouses to buffer the swings of the outside climate, and beneath the tobacco floors they cut vaulted cellars, kept at a constant 15.5°C. Two hundred years ago, keeping a leaf intact was an engineering discipline.
The problem of scale
I fall into conversation with Rich, a partner whose firm deploys and maintains Everpure storage, mostly for financial technology (fintech) customers. His challenges are “other vendors”, “keeping costs down”, and customers who want to “do more with less”. Then there is artificial intelligence (AI) – the problem of scale – and the chief executives who, as he puts it, “just want to do AI for AI’s sake”.
I’m reminded of a recent article in which I looked into the future of AI and MIT professor Daron Acemoglu’s characterisation of exactly this – as “so-so automation” that just replicates what humans do rather than augments them.
Thirty years against a hobby
Then there is Eric, who works for a manufacturing company. He’s here to explore Portworx, Everpure’s container management platform. His big challenge at the moment is the shift from VMware to Azure Local, which has been ordered from on high because of the cost of VMware.
How about AI? His managers keep saying, “Yeah, we need AI”, but he has to push back. “If we start doing that,” he says, “it has to sit on a stable footing, with compliance and everything else done properly.” He is not against the technology; he is against the hurry. He describes a massive data lake and the difficulty – the risk – of wading into it and starting to interrogate the thing, pulling on a thread that turns out to be holding something else together. Meanwhile, Azure Local, he tells me, is like “going back to the Stone Age”.
It is a fascinating conversation. He brings 30 years of software engineering experience, and I bring my bits-and-pieces, hobby-acquired knowledge, using tools he’s not come across, like Streamlit, Vercel and Firebase, that now let us build web applications with far less faff than in the past. He’s very experienced and very skilled, and the world we’re in is now removing – or maybe just moving – where the skill lies in IT.
The parallel nobody drew
I’m a little disappointed that no one on stage drew the storage parallel of the building we are in. The smugglers and river thieves of the 19th century have their descendants in ransomware crews and extortion cartels. The security walls look different now – sovereignty, compliance, the right to know where your data sits – and the fragility is digital rather than botanical. But the link is there.
By late morning the courtyard thins. The wooden roof holds its pattern against the sky and conversations tail off around me. I head for the tube, chatting to an old colleague and through the feet-thick portal beneath the hog’s head adorning its high wall.
