Current responsibilities
Gabe Cole is a managing director in JLL’s New England region, based in Boston. Gabe is an accomplished technology executive with over 20 years’ experience across data center, colocation, cloud, and network. He has worked engagements around the world. He is an expert at balancing reliability and performance requirements against technology and business limitations to consistently increase performance at progressively lower price points. In addition, he is frequently called on by investors for assistance with data centers, telco hotels, data center technologies, and service companies. Gabe founded and/or participated in a number of venture-backed emergent technology companies including RTE Group, Telwares, Virtustream, Verne Global, Enclave Properties, Ixpanse, and CO Space. Gabe joined JLL in February 2016, but had worked with the Boston team for many years as a consultant on data center and telco hotel projects.
Experience
Gabe was a founder and principal of RTE Group for 20 years prior to joining JLL, where he focused on tenant representation, agency services, investment analysis, and underwriting across the data center and technology space. Prior to that, Gabe spent 10 years as a consulting engineer with Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, specializing in failure analysis an design for reliability.
- Program development and management for six city data center expansion by web scale service provider.
- Capital markets sale of 230 Congress twice in a two year period
- Tenant representation for 10,000 sf pilot of infrastructure optimized data center in NY/NJ market for web scale service provider.
- Strategy development and tenant representation of NGIDC (Next Generation Internet Data Center) Consortium for 14 market search.
- Due diligence on the privatization of eight data centers in Poland and Czech Republic.
- Colocation and network strategy and optimization for global service provider.
- Due diligence, acquisition, and repositioning of 4 data centers in support of Virtustream (now part of EMC).
- Concept development, property acquisition, and utility negotiation in support of Verne Global in the Republic of Iceland.
Education and affiliations
Gabe is an engineer at heart and holds SB and SM degrees from the MIT. Gabe is also Executive Director of the Open-IX Association and an active member of the North American Network Operator’s Group (NANOG), the Pacific Telecommunications Council, and the MIT Enterprise forum.
