Salute is pleased to announce that Robert Heikaus has joined the leadership team as Managing Director, Americas, to lead regional growth and operational strategy.
Robert will oversee operations across North and South America, ensuring our teams continue to deliver the high-level reliability and scale our clients require in an increasingly complex market.
Bringing over 20 years of experience in the mission-critical sector. Most recently, he served as a Global Alliance Director for the Technical Division at CBRE GWS, where he specialized in leading transformational change for global accounts.
His background is defined by a “zero-outage” mindset. During an eight-year tenure at IBM, Robert served as the Data Center Facilities Operations Manager for the US East and West regions. Within IBM’s Global Center of Excellence, he led initiatives that fundamentally improved reliability across the fleet, driving operational outages toward zero through better staffing models and maintenance innovations.
“Robert doesn’t just manage operations; he understands the granular technical details that keep a facility running,” says Mike Jones, President, Global Operations. “His experience at IBM and CBRE proves he can handle the pressure of massive, complex portfolios. As we scale across the Americas, having someone with Robert’s technical depth at the helm is a huge win for both our team and our clients.”
Robert’s strategic approach is backed by a strong engineering foundation. He holds a Master of Science in Electrical, Computer & Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He spent his early career “in the trenches” as a Senior Commissioning Engineer at EYP Mission Critical Facilities and a Sales Engineer at APC-MGE (now Schneider Electric).
This mix of executive leadership and hands-on engineering gives him a unique perspective on the challenges facing today’s data center operators.
“I’ve spent my career focused on one thing: making sure the lights stay on and the servers keep humming, no matter how complex the environment gets,” says Robert Heikaus. “The data center world is changing fast with AI and massive power demands, and you can’t just throw more people at the problem – you need a smarter, more disciplined approach. I joined Salute because they get that. I’m looking forward to getting to work and helping our clients in the Americas build more resilient operations.”
Welcome to the team, Robert!