Currently, a server in a data center is managing a financial transaction. Another is routing an emergency call. A third person has a medical record that a doctor somewhere will need in the morning. Unnoticed until something goes wrong, these structures now act as the silent beating heart of modern life. When something does go wrong, it is immediately apparent to all.
For all the engineering precision that goes into building a modern data center- the redundant power feeds, the cooling architecture, and the network design, fire protection has long sat at the back of the room. It gets addressed, but rarely reimagined. It gets budgeted, but rarely questioned. Anne Omar is one of the people changing that. As Head of Business Unit Data Center at FOGTEC Fire Protection, she brings a rare combination of technical depth, global experience, and genuine intellectual curiosity to one of the most under-examined corners of critical infrastructure. She does not make noise for the sake of it. But when she speaks, the industry pays attention.
The Road Less Travelled
There is no straight line in Anne’s career. She began in marketing and HR, built experience in global key account management, and spent time in the recycling industry before eventually landing in the world of fire protection for data centers. On paper, these chapters look unrelated. In practice, they form the basis of how she thinks and leads.
Anne joined FOGTEC and took up a position that sits at the crossroads of engineering, sales strategy, global operations, and technical innovation. The company has built its reputation around high-pressure water mist systems, and Anne is now the person responsible for taking that expertise to the world’s largest digital infrastructure operators.
The skills she developed long before she stepped into fire protection have quietly shaped every part of her work. Her marketing background sharpens how she communicates complex technical ideas to clients. Anne’s HR experience informs how she builds teams across continents. Her time in the recycling industry gave her a practical lens on resource efficiency and environmental impact. These perspectives matter more than ever as the data center sector faces growing sustainability pressure.
“Everything is connected somehow and transferable. Almost nothing is a waste of time if you are able to see and use the knowledge you receive,” states Anne.
When Compliance Is Not Enough
Walk into most data centers today, and the fire protection strategy you find will likely be built around what the law requires. Local regulations, insurance standards, and public authority guidelines- these set the floor, and many operators treat them as the ceiling. Anne sees this as one of the most consequential gaps in the industry, and she does not soften her view on it.
She notes that some of the world’s most expensive and technologically advanced data center facilities are still relying on fire protection concepts that are more than 150 years old. The data center, as an infrastructure category, did not exist when those frameworks were designed. And yet the industry has largely accepted them without asking whether they are still fit for purpose.
Anne’s challenge to operators is specific: stop evaluating fire protection only by what it prevents, and start evaluating it by what happens when it activates. The real cost of a fire event is not always the fire itself. It is the downtime while a facility is cleaned and restored. It is the equipment damaged by the suppression system. It is the time before operations return to normal. These costs are measurable, and they rarely appear in the compliance checklist conversation.
Anne draws a comparison that makes the gap visible. In tunnels and public transportation infrastructure, also classified as critical, the reliability standards demanded of fire protection systems are far higher than anything currently required of data centers. She believes the data center industry should be holding itself to that same level of scrutiny, especially as these facilities become more central to how economies and societies function.
The Case for Water- Dismantling the Myth
For years, the debate between water-based fire suppression and gaseous systems in data centers was settled, for many operators, by a single assumption: water and electronics do not belong together. That assumption drove a strong preference for gas suppression systems, and for a long time, questioning it was an uphill conversation.
Anne engages with this debate carefully. She does not dismiss the underlying concern- electricity and water do carry real risks, and those risks deserve honest consideration. But she insists that the conversation has been too narrow. The question should not simply be whether to use water or gas. The question should be which system delivers better outcomes across the full range of factors that matter to operators.
Gas suppression systems, she points out, have their own significant consequences when they activate. They release corrosive substances that can damage equipment. They trigger downtime during evacuation and purge cycles and influence the room-layout of a data center by their design in a much higher way. False alarms, more common than many operators plan for, carry their own operational and financial cost. When these factors are added to the analysis alongside the water-versus-electricity concern, the picture becomes more balanced than the conventional wisdom suggests.
FOGTEC’s high-pressure water mist systems address the core concern directly. They use approximately 80% less water than traditional sprinkler systems, reducing the risk of collateral damage to electronics. High-pressure mist also delivers the highest cooling effect of any water-based suppression method- a characteristic that has proven valuable in protecting lithium-ion battery installations. Anne is not claiming water is always the right answer. She is arguing that it deserves a full and fair evaluation.
Leading at the Frontier: AI Infrastructure and Thermal Runaway
The data center landscape is changing faster than the fire protection frameworks built to govern it. AI infrastructure is driving a new generation of high-density server deployments with heat loads that earlier facility designs were never built to handle. Liquid cooling systems are becoming standard in premium facilities, introducing complex piping networks and in some cases highly flammable liquids into environments where fire safety planning was designed around very different conditions.
Anne is direct about what this means: the old playbooks need to be reconsidered. High ventilation speeds used to manage AI server heat can interfere with both fire detection and suppression performance. The physical architecture of liquid-cooled facilities creates fire risk profiles that traditional suppression designs were not built to address.
She is not raising these concerns to slow the industry down. She is raising them so that fire protection engineering keeps pace with the infrastructure it is protecting.
Her most pressing concern in this space is energy storage. Battery rooms are now an essential part of data center infrastructure, providing the backup power that keeps facilities running during grid interruptions. But the risk of thermal runaway, a cascade reaction within lithium-ion cells that generates intense heat and is extremely difficult to stop once it starts, is one the industry has not yet resolved with clear, universal guidance. She points out that reliability is not automatically guaranteed by redundancy when it comes to these types of risks.
FOGTEC started investing in this research area nearly a decade ago, recognizing that the guidelines simply did not exist. The company has since carried out some of the world’s largest real-scale battery fire tests, across multiple battery types, and the findings are beginning to shape international safety standards. Anne considers getting this research into the hands of operators and policymakers among the most important parts of her work.
One Standard, Every Continent
FOGTEC operates globally, with offices and operations in Cologne, Mumbai, Shanghai, Italy, and Hungary. The clients Anne works with are some of the world’s largest digital infrastructure players, and they bring with them a straightforward expectation: the standards they receive in Germany should be the standards they receive everywhere.
Delivering that consistency requires a clear framework. Anne builds it around long-standing local partnerships, regional subsidiaries, and where necessary, direct supervision or installation teams deployed from the German headquarters. Centralized project management is the constant- a single point of accountability that holds quality stable regardless of geography.
At the same time, she builds the supply chain model for each project in partnership with the client. Commissioning timelines, local regulatory conditions, and the specific technical requirements of each facility all shape how a project is structured. The framework is consistent; the execution is tailored.
The same philosophy runs through Anne’s approach to global R&D. Different teams bring different ideas, shaped by their own cultures and working environments. She sees this as a genuine advantage. When diverse thinking meets a shared technical challenge, and when the discussion is moderated well, the solutions that emerge are stronger than what any single team would have developed alone.
Stay Open. Everything Connects.
Anne does not describe her career as planned. She describes it as a series of choices to stay open to opportunities that were not obvious, to industries that seemed distant, and to projects that sat outside her immediate expertise. That willingness to step toward the unfamiliar, she believes, is what has given her the range to do her current job well.
Her advice to emerging leaders is rooted in this. She tells them that almost nothing is wasted- not the role that seemed irrelevant, not the project that felt like a detour, not the industry that had nothing to do with where they thought they were headed. Every experience deposits something.
Sometimes it is a skill. Sometimes it is simply the knowledge of what not to do. Both count.
Anne also holds a clear view on what makes technical leadership work globally. When people from different backgrounds come together on a hard technical question, the friction, when managed well, produces better answers. Physics and chemistry do not vary by nationality. But the ways people approach problems and build solutions do.
Anne sees her job, in part, as translating local knowledge into a shared language and directing that energy toward better outcomes.
The data center industry is at an inflection point. Energy demands are climbing, AI infrastructure is rewriting the design rulebook, and the stakes of operational failure have never been higher. Anne is not standing at the edge of this moment, watching from a distance. She is in the middle of it, asking the questions the industry needs to hear, building the research base to answer them, and leading a team working to make sure fire protection keeps pace with the world it is built to protect.
