Executive Insights: Corey Dyer of Digital Realty

COREY DYER, Digital Realty

Corey Dyer is Executive Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing, with responsibility for sales, leasing and marketing efforts across the organization. Prior to joining Digital Realty, Corey served as Senior Vice President, Sales, Americas at Equinix, where he had responsibility for sales across the Americas region. Before joining Equinix, Corey worked at Hewlett-Packard, where he served as Vice President, Storage Sales, Canada and led the firm’s Canadian storage business. Previously, he held various sales and sales leadership positions at Dell, primarily in the server, software and peripheral businesses. Corey has over 25 years of experience as a sales leader with a track record of building and driving sales and marketing operations at leading technology companies. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Wake Forest University.

Here’s the full text of Corey Dyer’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:

Data Center Frontier: What is the one trend you believe will be the most significant in shaping the data center industry in 2020, and why?

Corey Dyer: 2020 will be a big year for digital transformation. With technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain creating new possibilities, and organizations feeling the pressures of digital transformation, both private and public enterprises across all industries are going to need to transform their IT infrastructure so that they can operate globally and on-demand.

However, as most IT teams know, modifying IT environments to stay ahead of business demands is a challenging task, and often easier said than done. Enterprises are becoming increasingly buried in data due to AI, IoT and data analytics, and it becomes harder and harder to move. This is “data gravity” and it can completely derail a digital transformation strategy. If IT teams aren’t taking the right steps to manage their data, they’ll have massive amounts of data generated and stored in separate data centers, clouds, and edge locations, which can cause latency issues. This explosion of data will cause an exponential demand for more data center resources and power.

To avoid the perils of data gravity and be able to scale digital businesses, enterprises will need to re-architect towards a decentralized infrastructure that accommodates distributed workflows from multi-cloud to edge. We also expect customers to have a more global strategy, and as a result, will need to be able to be closer to their points of data. We’ll also see more companies gravitate towards providers who can support them globally.

Data Center Frontier: After several years of robust growth, leasing in the hyperscale data center market moderated in 2019. What do you foresee for the hyperscale market in 2020?

Corey Dyer: In 2020, I think we’re going to see a bigger hyperscale market worldwide. While the need for hyperscale data centers is greatest in metros like the U.S. and Europe, the rest of the world is catching up quickly. In regions like Asia and Latin America, the data center market has been growing fast over the past couple of years and it will likely continue to grow, due to the data economy.

We’re also seeing a lot of U.S.-based companies taking their business global because of the digital boom happening in cities all across the world and their need to be closer to their global customers. Because of all this development in global regions, there’s a growing dependency in hyperscale data centers facilities, and I think we can expect them to be in demand beyond the US and Europe. According to Synergy, in 2017 there were only 24 companies worldwide that matched the definition of “hyperscale” and they operated at a combined 320 data centers. But for 2020, Synergy reports that there are expected to be over 500 hyperscale data center facilities worldwide. A lot of that has to do with emerging technologies and where businesses are operating.

The amount of data being created is not slowing down, and hybrid cloud solutions are on the rise. As more companies worldwide leverage cloud-support architectures, hyperscale deployments are going to continue to increase.

The Digital Realty data center campus in Franklin Park in Suburban Chicago. (Image: Digital Realty)

Data Center Frontier: Is the data center industry making progress on its staffing challenges? What are the most important steps to ensure a vibrant future workforce?

Corey Dyer: There are definitely still staffing challenges for the data center industry, but for us at Digital Realty, we’ve been able to address those challenges by thinking differently about the way we attract and keep talent. It used to be that we were looking for employees that had significant data center work experience, but that can be a small pool of people and unnecessarily limiting. Now we’re focused on finding and developing a pipeline of talent that have the right technical skills, even if they don’t have any data center experience, because we’re able to teach them the skill set they need to develop into their role and beyond. We’ve found a lot of success partnering with local colleges and universities to reach students, and hiring veterans through our internal veterans employee resource group. While they may not have any data center experience, they’re trained with the right technical skills that can transfer to the data center.

Of course there’s a lot of fierce competition for talent, especially in popular regions like Ashburn, Virginia. So to ensure a vibrant future workforce, you need to be giving your employees good benefits, a supportive culture and successful work environment. We have a group of employees, the Digital Realty Culture Club-Ashburn Campus, who do a lot of great work to help on this front. Employees want to like the people they work with, enjoy their work environment, and feel like they have the opportunity to move up in their career path. What Digital Realty does well is foster an environment where employees have the freedom to make career choices that are best for them. For instance, someone in operations has the opportunity to move into other business areas by gaining experience and preparing themselves when opportunities arise.

On a basic level, a vibrant workforce should be a place where people from different and diverse backgrounds can work together to create a great product in a great environment. At Digital Realty, we’ve been fortunate to work with some of the best people in the industry and help foster a better community in the areas that we operate in.

Data Center Frontier: There’s been intense interest in edge computing, a trend which spans multiple technologies, scenarios and use cases. How would you assess the current state of edge computing, and what developments lie ahead in 2020?

Corey Dyer: Gone are the days of choosing a data center just because it’s close to your company’s headquarters. Companies are now operating globally, across multiple areas with many different data centers, which is causing IT architecture needs to be pushed out beyond traditional cloud and data centers and to the edge. The demands of low latency, reduced backhaul network loading and overall higher performance requirements are also driving the need for new, highly-local tier of internet infrastructure enabled by edge data centers. The benefit of the edge is that dedicated resources are closer to end users and devices, which frees up core architecture and valuable network assets for other mission-critical tasks, while also decreasing latency and increasing speed.

However, while some workloads perform better at the edge, it doesn’t mean that all workloads should be moved to the edge; some should still remain at the core. For example, intensive technologies such as AI and machine learning (ML) are being pushed to the edge, but they also often require efficient access to core resources in order to function effectively. Data centers can handle heavy computing and storing large amounts of data that the edge cannot, and so the edge and core need to be thought of as complementary to each other.

Digital business will need to develop an enterprise network architecture that is localized at global points of business presence, consolidates traffic flows and end point management, and is interconnected in network hubs. Businesses will have reduced latency and increased throughput to handle the high volume of workflows. This strategy also brings users, systems, and the network to the data, which removes barriers of data gravity and creates centers of data exchange to scale digital business.

We actually recently announced an edge alliance with Vapor IO for their Kinetic Edge Exchange (KEX), the world’s first software-defined systems for interconnection in edge locations, to help businesses take advantage of the edge. KEX will be deployed in our centers of data exchange campuses, making possible new distributed workflows spanning from core to edge to scale digital business.

In 2020, advances in SDN, 5G and other networking technologies will also continue to shape the role of edge computing. Businesses will have more flexibility to position their assets where they’re needed most and will take advantage of emerging technologies in the cloud. That will further transform the edge-to-core landscape and many large cloud providers will be focused on building applications and cutting-edge services to address the edge.