Meet Antonín Roškota – the planner behind our modular data centre deliveries

From a logistics career spent moving parcels across the planet to delivering twenty-tonne data centre modules. Meet Antonín Roškota, Head of Projects and Delivery at ALTRON Modular.

When his former colleague Hanka Kupcová reached out after his previous job, saying, “we could really use someone like you here at ALTRON Modular,” Antonín had no idea what he was getting into. Modular data centres were a completely different world from anything he’d worked on.

Antonín is a logistician by training and by instinct. He has spent his entire career in logistics, working with logistics service providers, manufacturing plants, and trading companies alike.

Along the way, he gradually grew into a project manager because planning is simply in his nature. In recent years, he led large investment projects building logistics centres that have to be designed so they actually run efficiently afterward. He has fifteen years in the automotive industry and six years at Alza.

“I can help people realise things I don’t understand myself, and that gives my professional life meaning.”

Where he fits in

Right after he started at ALTRON Modular, he saw a team of engineers whose precision and quality were in their blood. He describes his role as pairing that craftsmanship with project tempo: a clear, steady drive from the first contract to final delivery.

In practice, that means he takes the whole project, reads the contract, understands his own obligations as well as the client’s, plans everything over time, and connects production with suppliers so it all runs on schedule. He oversees invoicing and cash flow, and ultimately owns the project’s final margin.

“Project management is a craft like any other. It has its rules and its standards. It’s not as if I can show up and say, well, sales didn’t negotiate that. The responsibility stays with me.”

Interestingly, at ALTRON Modular he stepped back into the craft itself. In his previous roles, he no longer managed the day-to-day work directly. He had a team.

“Here I get to build these things from scratch. I enjoy driving out to the company that welds our containers and talking with them about real problems, like why a lifting eye we use to hoist a container cracked somewhere.”

Twenty tonnes, placed to within two centimetres

His biggest adventures have come with ALTRON Modular.

“Picture someone who spent his whole life in a factory or a warehouse. And suddenly he has to pack up and fly to Africa.”

There, with local crews speaking French, he had to organise placing a twenty-tonne module within plus or minus two centimetres. It was over thirty degrees outside, the sun blazing. Before any of it could happen, a sheep and a chicken had to be sacrificed, and a tree had to be deconsecrated. It was sacred and had to be “released” before it could be felled.

He had never faced anything like it, and he counts it a success. He had it under control. The people were happy, the modules ended up exactly where they were meant to be, and he got it done on time.

“What am I proud of? That at fifty, I managed to psych myself up for an adventure like that and didn’t back down.”

In the spring he visited Africa, this time primarily in the role of a consultant, working mainly with a client from the Emirates.

What keeps him in the job most isn’t the travel.

“What I value most about this company is the product itself. I think it has a bright future. It’s sophisticated 21st-century technology.”

Paradoxically, he admits he doesn’t understand the product in detail, just as he never fully understood cars, despite fifteen years in the automotive industry. But what has always fascinated him is meeting people who understand something he doesn’t.

The worst-case scenario approach

The core of his work is analysing risks and covering them in advance. He describes himself as sensitive to risk.

“Risk assessment is one of the fundamental project-management methodologies. There’s a whole science to it. I always see the worst-case scenario, but that’s exactly why I’m prepared. Forewarned is forearmed.”

His approach fits the industry, where investments are calculated over long horizons and a different level of precision applies.

What lies ahead

Antonín treats his first year with us as a warm-up – short trips, simpler modules, a taster. Now two significantly larger and more complex projects are coming, with ALTRON Modular serving as the general contractor and responsible for preparing the entire site.

What’s he personally looking forward to? Spending more time with non-European cultures.

Personal life

Outside of work, Antonín sings in the Teachers’ Mixed Choir in Kutná Hora, whose repertoire spans everything from operatic choruses and sacred music to reworkings of modern compositions.

“It’s a threefold joy. You bring joy to yourself, the community of singers, and the audience.”

His two children are visual artists, so he spends a great deal of time at exhibitions and classical-music concerts. His garden also takes up a fair chunk of time.

And because he was missing exercise, he bought a kayak last year. This autumn he’s planning to paddle somewhere in the Mediterranean.