GEC NEWS WIRE“Are my customers happy” is not the question that matters. “Why are they happy” matters.”
Michael Winterson, Managing Director EMEA, Equinix
Tell us something about your recent geographical expansions and its purposes?
We have had 5 major expansions this year; Rio, Melbourne, London, New York and Osaka. Once we realize the significance of a city, we keep investing there and buy space and make sure that we are continuing our services and expansion there regardless of the number of our existing data centres there.
Talking about our venture into the Middle East, the gulf region presents a buffet of opportunities for global countries to invest in cloud opportunities and Dubai is geographically a favourable position for channels to flow.
Give us a glimpse of your data centre and colocation services?
We don’t provide networks, we don’t provide clouds or any managed services; our customers do that. We provide the building for these services, which is completely physical and which takes a lot of regulatory norms and licenses from the telecom sector. It takes both long and short term planning for establishing a data centre.
Colocation is the service provided in the data centre; it’s more about the customer lifecycle. Customer follows a customer. In order for a customer to walk into your data centre you need to have a customer in the data centre. So that’s where the idea of campus comes into. If I have 150-200 customers in the first data centre, I can align it with the second data centre and so on and so forth.
How would you scale the readiness of enterprises in the Middle East in terms of Data security?
Looking strictly at the enterprise adoption of new technologies in the EMEA market compared to other markets, I see there is ample engagement with vendors and suppliers but I don’t see large adoption of technology in the MENA market. I have worked closely with some of the key players like Google and Amazon. There are some technologies that they deploy based on the level of consumption in a particular region, and I have seen that a good part of it is not deployed in this region which makes it clear that the adoption and consumption of enterprise technology is lagging in the MENA region.
Please tell us something about Equinix Cloud Exchange and Hybrid Cloud infrastructure?
Equinix offers data center industry’s broadest choice in cloud service providers, with many of them offering direct connections to their cloud infrastructure via Equinix Cloud Exchange, Equinix Cross Connects or Ethernet services. We are the only data center provider offering direct connection to both AWS and Microsoft Azure.
How does Equinix Data Centers stand out amongst the crowd?
We always connect our data centres and ensure that our clients never ever lose their data. We never go dark. We aim to create data centre communities, which we call ‘campus’ across cities and connect the infrastructures to ensure data protection. We are also gradually developing our back offices that would ensure that our customers leave the data centres satisfied and secure. It will also scrutinize the ‘happiness factor’ that would tell us why our customers are happy.
Is there any new channel partnership program in the pipeline?
Yes, we are in talks with many organizations in Dubai and the Middle East—though its too early to talk about this. The reason for this alliance is that, we are a single service provider and many times our customers come to us and end-up looking for more. So, through this channel partners we wish to expand our service base and also simultaneously expand our local market knowledge.
What is your recommendation to the Middle Eastern CIOs and CTOs?
‘Cloud’ as a solution is offering innumerable opportunities to the enterprises, so my recommendation to the CIOs is “Go Global”. Grab resources and news from across the globe and weave the standards into your organizational infrastructure. Solutions across the world are standardized, networks are open. So, don’t wait for the solutions to come to you, rather explore it.
Secondly, create a team in your organization that can ‘innovate’ rather than ‘work’.
And lastly, collect and preserve all your data. Never discard any data—structured or unstructured. Storage is feasible, affordable as well as mandate.
