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Mark Thiele has spent his entire life in and around IT infrastructure, even building his own fair share of data centers. But if there is one thing about the entire process that he finds vexing, it’s the wasted time between when companies start negotiating contracts for data centers to when it actually launches.. So after a 27-year career working with other companies, he set out on his own and started Edgevana with a simple goal: to help companies get to the edge faster.

“Getting to the edge may seem hard for some, but it’s not for lack of capability,” he said. The problem for most is not that stuff isn’t available, but how do I find it? And how do I make quick determinations about what combination of services or capabilities or partners do I need in order to solve the problem or create the opportunity that I’m pursuing for my business?”

Mark joined IT Visionaries to discuss why streamlining the buying and implementation process is the key to moving quickly to the edge. Plus, Mark touches on why edge computing continues to be on the rise and what IT leaders should be looking for in edge technology.

Main Takeaways

• What To Solve For: At the end of the day, the main goal of edge computing is to solve two things: t latency, and how data is going to be used.
• Hit the Easy Button: The negotiation process and implementation of new data centers in the past has been a grueling and time-consuming process. Edgevana is simplifying that process by allowing companies to quickly negotiate contracts and string together equipment at various locations in partnership with other Edgevana users. By doing this, Edgevana is giving more users access to the market at a quicker pace.
• Data Centers Still Exist?: Even with cloud infrastructure, data centers will continue to thrive well into the future because they serve two main purposes: first, companies continue to use them as a more reliable source for some of their aging technologies. Second, even if most companies were to convert their old technology stacks over to the cloud, most of those technologies would still be running from the physical data centers, so enterprises would then be paying to store this data in two different spaces.

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For a more in-depth look at this episode, check out the article below.

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Mark Thiele has spent his entire life in and around IT infrastructure, even building his own fair share of data centers. But if there is one thing about the entire process that he finds vexing, it’s the wasted time between when companies start negotiating contracts for data centers to when it actually launches.. So after a 27-year career working with other companies, he set out on his own and started Edgevana with a simple goal: to help companies get to the edge faster.

“Getting to the edge may seem hard for some, but it’s not for lack of capability,” he said. The problem for most is not that stuff isn’t available, but how do I find it? And how do I make quick determinations about what combination of services or capabilities or partners do I need in order to solve the problem or create the opportunity that I’m pursuing for my business?”

Mark joined IT Visionaries to discuss why streamlining the buying and implementation process is the key to moving quickly to the edge. Plus, Mark touches on why edge computing continues to be on the rise and what IT leaders should be looking for in edge technology.

Founded in 2019, Edgevana was built with the intent and purpose of revolutionizing the buying and selling process for data centers. As the backbone of any IT department, Edgevana believes that by federating the access of data centers around the world, it can deliver a better and more efficient service to its customers. As Theile said, this process of sharing data centers is the natural progression of how they should be utilized moving forward.

“Edge was going to be big enough that all of the infrastructure that we have available on the planet now needs to be brought to bear,” he said. “The best way to expand the market is not by forcing everyone to build new, but rather to leverage existing infrastructure. People buying for edge and for digital transformation are no longer buying the neighborhood data center. That’s not their strategy anymore. With the thousands of data centers around the world, individually each one of those data centers may not seem all that important, but connected, they offer an enormous opportunity to the customer.”

Thiele believes that companies can no longer justify spending millions of dollars on infrastructure alone. But rather by piecing together thousands of data center locations across the world, this process provides companies with a much more economic solution than building data centers on their own.

“What I’m hoping to be able to do is, for lack of a better description, to put the easy button on being able to string together the locations that you want to be able to deploy your equipment,” he said. “Whether that equipment is yours or in partnership with some other supplier in partnership with Edgevana, but the primary goal for Edgevanna is really just to simplify how you get access to that market.’ 

The idea for more distributed data centers came about from Thiele’s personal experience in the marketplace. With more than a quarter-century of experience building and buying data centers, the biggest frustration he experienced was the amount of time it took to move from buying and negotiating deals, to actual deployment.

“The due diligence for each data center can be problematic,” Thiele said. “If the average buyer getting into one data center can take three to six months or longer, what are you going to do when you need 10, 20, or a hundred data centers? You can’t possibly support the idea of sending teams of people around the world to identify a hundred different suppliers for your 200 locations.” 

According to Thiele, the route for creating competition in the market, while solving for the customer problems was to help individual data center operators become more visible to their customers. So he created a community of data centers around a standardized operating procedure for bringing on new customers and how they build out new data stacks. A process Thiele referred to as revolutionary in space.

So why do these massive data centers still exist? According to Thiele, companies are still very unlikely to give up all of their computer infrastructure because of a fear that they may still need the data from some of those older technologies down the road. 

“A majority of companies will want to protect themselves just in case because rebuilding what they had will be too hard,” he said “[Companies] recognize that some of the applications that they have are really old and are unlikely to be updated, but the data that supports them and other applications, it’s all on-premise. And if they move that data to the cloud, they’ll be paying for it in the cloud and there’ll be paying to run it on-premise. So these are some of the reasons why data centers will continue to exist and continue and continue to grow.”

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To hear the entire discussion, tune into IT Visionaries here.