Meet Ondřej Horák, Product Manager, who helped build ALTRON Modular’s product from a blank page

Ondřej Horák didn’t plan to end up in data centres. He came from aviation, and after years in the industry, felt the pull for something new with no fixed idea of where that would lead.

That openness is what brought him to ALTRON, a couple of years before ALTRON Modular existed as a name. The company’s CEO reached out personally to ask whether he’d be interested in joining, just as ALTRON was beginning to build something entirely its own – a microdata centre product.

Ondřej joined just before COVID hit, and by his own account, the first year or two were hard. A new industry, new problems, and a product being defined from scratch.

“I saw the potential and thought: it’s a tech company, which is what I enjoy. I’m curious by nature, and difficult problems are always interesting to me, especially finding solutions to them.”

From product to platform

Ondřej started as a product manager, responsible for a single product, the microdata centre, with the task of determining whether it was right, and how to grow it. At the time, the conversation was purely about the Czech market.

Then our company opened a new, export-focused division, centered on prefabricated data centres, something we had already done in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and to some extent the Middle East, but now with the ambition to build a team that could take that know-how further afield – multilingual and willing to set aside Czech habits and assumptions to meet international markets where they are.

Seven years later, Ondřej has moved from managing a single product to leading a team – his newest and, in his words, most demanding role yet.

He describes his work today as spanning closely linked disciplines:

• watching the market and shaping where the product goes next,
• working directly with customers to translate their business needs into technical solutions,
• then translating the technical answer back into language the business side can act on,
• and now managing the people who do all of it.

Helping customers find out what they need

A recurring part of the job, Ondřej says, is helping customers figure out what they actually need, which isn’t always what they initially ask for.

“People often picture that they need a Mercedes, but it turns out a Kia would do the job for their use case. But everyone knows Mercedes from the ads, so that’s what they want.”

He draws the comparison further – most cars on the road carry one or two people, rarely four, even though nearly every car is built to carry four. Data centres, he says, are often built the same way – bigger than the job in front of them actually requires.

Part of his role is to walk a customer through that gap, clarifying what they say they need, what they actually plan to use, and where their real risk tolerance sits.

Not every customer wants the cheapest option, and not every customer wants the most expensive one. They want the right one for them, which is a different question altogether.

Modularity, he argues, is part of the answer. Building for what’s needed today, with the ability to add capacity tomorrow, rather than over-building from day one to cover a five-year forecast that may never fully materialise.

Which project is Ondřej personally proudest of? It isn’t a data centre at all.

One project Ondřej is proudest of is Altron Modular’s third-generation Edge product, and the reason is design, not engineering.

Edge units start life looking a lot like shipping containers – similar proportions, similar format. The team’s challenge was to take that starting point and turn it into something that doesn’t just function – it draws the eye. One live example now stands in Prague.

“We wanted someone to look at it and not think: there’s another switchboard, another container dumped somewhere. We wanted them to think: that’s actually kind of nice – what is that?”

When the team unveiled the third-generation design in their production hall, with journalists and colleagues in the room, the reveal was literally staged behind a curtain. Ondřej remembers the moment people saw it in person, rather than in a photo, as something else entirely. What confirmed it had worked for him came after.

Photos from the reveal started circulating organically on LinkedIn, shared person-to-person across the data centre industry.

“That people started sending it to each other was, for me, proof that it actually landed. Technology can be beautiful.”

Staying a step ahead

These days, a growing share of Ondřej’s attention is focused on how quickly the ground is shifting under the industry, largely because of AI.

“For years, we could reassure ourselves that we’d solved the big questions, and were only fine-tuning efficiency and optimisation around the edges. Then data centres running serious GPU workloads arrived, and the numbers on both sides of the equation multiplied by ten, even a hundred.”

Because large data centre investments can take a year or more to plan and build, Ondřej’s job increasingly means designing for what a customer will need in six months or a year, not just what they’re asking for today.

Alongside that, there is a growing focus on sustainability – efficiency, heat reuse, and reducing the footprint of a technology that, in his words, has gone from something almost nobody thought about five years ago to something the general public now actively associates with high energy and water use.

Personal life

Outside of work, Ondřej’s main focus these days is his young daughter. “She won’t want this much attention from me forever, so right now, I’m happy to give it,” he says.

Beyond that, he remains broadly curious about technology and infrastructure, including, unsurprisingly, aviation. He spends his free time cycling, hiking, and running outdoors, waiting for his daughter to be old enough to join him on a bike.

Asked to close with where he sees the data centre world in five years, Ondřej offers a comparison – much as the 1960s space program produced technologies now embedded in everyday life, from digital cameras to Velcro, he expects today’s AI-driven pressure on data centres to force real technological progress, in energy generation and efficiency, which will reach far beyond the industry that demanded it.