Hi, and welcome to the Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. My guest on this episode is Chris Sharp. He's the CTO of Digital Realty. It's not that often that I get to meet someone for the first time on the podcast, but here we were meeting on camera for the first time. Chris has spent seven and a half years at Digital Realty, Equinix before that. Couple tours of duty with traditional network carriers. We commiserated on that a bit. I had some of my own but if you're not familiar with Digital Realty, they are one of the largest colocation operators in the world, and he had some really interesting perspective on approaching the pandemic from a global level.
They got a jump on their US plan, because frankly, they had already experienced some of the hotspots, Singapore in particular, being one of their larger data centers that they had to contend with. So they sort of made their mistakes there, sort of had their plans already in place.
For the US a lot of it was about how to ensure you had talent in physical locations that you didn't get stuck overseas. While sending information workers home, a really interesting way of thinking about sort of the people aspects of that. He also talked about how they had to evolve pretty quickly in COLO because let's face it, the, the digital economy was driven by people in these large data centers during the pandemic. So, you know, increased demand increased install timeframes all based on the pandemic. Even thinking about things like the fuel for backup generators, not being guaranteed from a delivery perspective, were all things they had to contend with. We did get into a discussion about what he thinks is not returning to normal and what they think and what's interesting, you know, Chris shared his feelings about how the internet has fundamentally changed in terms of its traffic patterns. In particular, the flow of traffic from sort of centralized office hubs out to the cloud. Now it's sort of a thousand points of light in the home out to various cloud vendors. All of the sudden, customers were seeing traffic change from a handful of giant nodes to a million users at home on various ISPs.
And here I am thinking about them having real estate challenge. When in reality Digital Realty spent a lot of their effort in the pandemic just figuring out how to re-architect the network based on this new flow and, and based on the way that their customers were interacting with services and interacting in some ways with each other.
It really forced them up the stack as a real estate company to think about application use of their customers. So not just a power pipe and ping business in a lot of ways. I guess that's the digital part of Digital Realty. You know, he shared some trends around what they're seeing with customers.
Moving out, maybe not moving out, but moving some workloads from hyperscalers back into COLO and settling into hybrid architectures, taking more COLO as a result. I shared a blog from the CEO of Basecamp on my LinkedIn last week and, and got a little, I riled up some salespeople online, but it is a real conversation about which workloads belong.
As we're beginning to optimize our workloads to our new reality. And, you know, the move to hyperscale while elasticity and capacity are immediate, not every workload fits very well in the sort of coin operated model of usage and hyperscale. So just a real conversation, one we're having very, very often at Bridgepointe with our customers.
He also talked about capacity being the new currency of the digital age. If you think about it, the big hyperscalers are also consumers of COLO, right? So as they expand, they're competing with customers who are looking for their own data center space, planning your digital footprint is essential if you are buying services really at a real estate level to support your business. Supply chain challenges are not going away. Availability of data center space in your desired geography is not assured and it's one of the things that sort of planning ahead working with organizations like Bridgepointe are really important. In our fun know, shameless predictions section, we talked about personal media, algorithms, what we get served, who owns curation you know, maybe more transparency coming from those providers in the future about how they're delivering content to you. It was an interesting and kind of fun departure from the rest of the conversation, but it was really thought provoking. At a high level this was a different conversation. We've talked to cloud company service providers, collab, VDI.
We've talked to network and security execs, you know, but here in this conversation, I got the opportunity to take a deep dive down into a real estate business in a lot of ways that found that it too is climbing up the digital transformation ladder to build and grow based on their customer's application use.
So, you know, here we are, a great chat with a self-professed technologist in a real estate business. This is my conversation with Chris Sharp, the CTO of Digital Realty.
ABOUT CHRIS:
Chris Sharp has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, with an extensive background in developing technology strategies in global markets. He has a deep knowledge of the data center sector and is well positioned to expand technical innovation at Digital Realty. Most recently, he was responsible for cloud innovation at Equinix, where he led the development of innovative cloud services solutions and developed new capabilities enabling next-generation, high-performance exchange and interconnection solutions, facilitating broad commercial adoption of cloud computing on a global basis. Previously, Mr. Sharp held leadership positions at top network and colocation providers, including Qwest Communications, MCI/Verizon Business and Reliance Globalcom.
CONTACT CHRIS
Web: https://www.digitalrealty.com/about/leadership/chris-sharp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislsharp/