Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm Scott Kinka. My guest on this episode is D.R. Carlson. He's the Director of Segment Marketing for Equinix. We joked a little bit, I asked him what D.R. meant, he said “disaster recovery”. D.R. has been at Equinix for two different stints. He's about to have his second fifth anniversary with the company and is a father of four, 10 to 18 years old, from Ashburn, Virginia. Kind of right where colo all started.
Equinix started as a peering provider. I sort of threw out, hey, I know them as colo and he sort of corrected me. They built colo around their peering network and from there became one of the larger network service providers in the world.
They consider themselves, given their interconnection strategy, an on ramp to the digital economy. I'll describe that a little bit more in a few moments. What I really loved about this conversation, is that D.R. is both a technologist and a marketing guy. He had some really polished answers around some of the things that we talk about on this podcast.
Here's an example. He compared the pandemic to a health scare. Interesting, right? The things that you should do to get healthy aren't really any different than the things that you should do before you're sick. Right? But now those things are more important. He applied that to the pandemic. He used that to explain sort of the impending event that the pandemic became.
If you were doing the right things, you are generally fine. If you weren't, you were sick and you needed to react quickly. We talked about how to think about the digital transformation in 2023, and he made it really simple. The way that Equinix talks the digital economy is that businesses need to focus on three things.
First, interconnecting their core. Second interconnecting their digital systems, and then third, interacting at the edge. Now, I'm not going to describe each one of those things in detail here, and I couldn't do it as good as he does, but generally speaking, if your initiative doesn't fit into one of those categories, don't do it.
I'll let him break that down a little bit more on the pod, but I do think it's a useful way to break down your technology roadmap. He also describes the cloud hangover and what he means by that is running into clouds and looking at them as destinations, when really they're just a portion of an overall network strategy.
Data center, core has moved, but app strive traffic edge is largely now in the home. So consider how people, traffic and patterns flow and that should really be the root of the IT conversation. And this is what in his mind in some cases, is driving customers away from a hundred percent cloud infrastructure into hybrid architectures.
We've heard that repeated quite a bit on the pod so far this year. Everyone is trying to do the same thing; connect more people in more locations with more devices to more information in a secure manner. The lesson I took from it, stop buying tech, and start supporting use cases, understand the users. We wrapped up with his love of Spotify and his desire to play Steven the Irishman in the movie Braveheart. You'll love that.
This chat was a lot of fun and I definitely stole some nuggets that will become a part of my speak going forward. Here is D.R. “Disaster Recovery” Carlson, the Director of Segment Marketing from Equinix.
ABOUT D.R.
D.R. is the Director of Segment Marketing for the Americas for Equinix focusing on joint messaging and go-to- market strategy with Equinix’s largest partners. D.R. has also worked as VP, Sales and Strategic Partnerships for Neovera (Equinix New Partner of the Year 2017), and Oratium a company that built sales messaging for companies, trained Ted speakers, and prepared Executives for Keynote speeches.
CONTACT D.R.