The Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable features insights from industry executives with lengthy experience in the data center industry. Here’s a look at the insights from Chris Bair of Iron Mountain Data Centers.
CHRIS BAIR, Iron Mountain
Chris Bair is the Vice-President of Sales and Marketing for Iron Mountain’s Data Center division. Prior to Iron Mountain, Chris was SVP of Sales at CoreSite during the company’s successful NYSE IPO. Before CoreSite, Chris was part of the turnaround team that drove Qualifacts to become the largest Behavioral Health SaaS Electronic Health Record provider in the US. Mr. Bair’s initial leadership roles were with Inflow, which was purchased by SunGard. At SunGard, Chris led the team responsible for all new business sales in the Western United States.
Prior to entering the private sector Mr. Bair was a Captain and Pilot in the United States Air Force. Bair received a M.S. in Management from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and a B.S. from the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO.
Here’s the full text of Chris Bair’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: What is the one trend you believe will be most significant in shaping the data center industry in 2018, and why?
Chris Bair: The Cloud continues to disrupt and drive data storage outside of internal enterprise data centers. Enterprise and public sector customers are continuing to shift load from legacy (and discontinue large investments in new facilities with 20-year life cycles). The rapid change in IT infrastructure makes 20-year bets on internal facilities very difficult for most users.
Data Center Frontier: 2017 has been an interesting year for wholesale data center providers. Some have focused on winning huge hyperscale deals, others on expanding into colocation and interconnection, or targeting key industry verticals. How do you see the landscape for wholesale providers evolving in 2018, and what do you see as the keys to success?
Chris Bair: Our belief is that strong systems and the ability to deliver inventory that meet the operational and financial demands of retail colocation, wholesale and hyperscale providers is critical. Iron Mountain is fortunate to have a huge customer base (230,000 customers in 52 countries). We want to be able to meet their needs wherever they fall on the spectrum with the level of reliability and security they expect from Iron Mountain.
Data Center Frontier: Data center geography is a hot topic. What geographic markets will be strongest in 2018, and why? What are the up-and-coming markets that may make headlines in 2018?
Chris Bair: We think the major interconnection markets in the US will continue to be disruptive in 2018 and beyond—particularly those with favorable energy costs and tax benefits for the operators and our customers. We also think that you need to be in the “right” markets to meet the needs of your vertical customers. IRM’s largest vertical (corporately) is financial services. We’ve purposefully invested in London, NYC/NJ, NoVa, Boston and Singapore to ensure our footprint is relevant to FSIs (financial services institutions).
Data Center Frontier: The data center industry has seen growing interest from new investors and a wave of mergers and acquisitions. How might these trends shape the competitive landscape in 2018?
Chris Bair: We think it will create additional barriers to entry—scale and cost of capital will become increasingly important. It will be difficult for early stage organizations or companies with higher capital costs to compete against the large, well-funded REIT’s in the sector.