Q&A with COLOTRAQ CEO, Dany Bouchedid
Element Critical sat down with COLOTRAQ CEO, Dany Bouchedid to discuss their approach to the colocation procurement process and the overall state of the industry in 2020 and beyond.
EC: How would you define COLOTRAQ’s unique value to clients going through the data center services procurement process?
DB: When a client is ready to procure data center services, they want to make sure they have the right team with the right experience in their corner. There are hundreds of service providers out there with various solutions built on varying platforms ranging from wholesale to retail colocation, to completely virtualized offerings and hybrid infrastructure alternatives. COLOTRAQ has been laser-focused on assisting clients procure their data center infrastructure for over 21 years and has extensive experience and expertise in this area. This is the only type of work we have done so it has allowed us to develop a core competency in the sourcing process specifically for data center services. We have worked on over 3,000 client engagements worldwide to date that span across multiple deployment and application types. Plus, COLOTRAQ has the largest portfolio of vendors and services in the industry as we have over 400 direct agreements with every colocation, cloud and connectivity provider in 120 countries and territories. We are perfectly positioned to help any client efficiently deploy an optimized data center infrastructure solution in any market.
EC: What is DCITRAQ and what is its main value to clients and vendors?
DB: DCITRAQ is the industry’s first and only cloud-based software that allows users to dynamically research, compare and source colocation, managed hosting, cloud & connectivity from over 400 service providers worldwide. DCITRAQ incorporates a customizable algorithm that matches a client’s project requirements to the offerings and capabilities that vendors have specified in the system. Dynamic sorting and filtering capabilities provide you with even more control in determining from which vendors you should request quotes. A user will then be able to launch a comparison chart that will highlight the matching vendors’ capabilities and offerings to further streamline and simplify the sourcing process. As an additional layer of empowering and educating our clients on the various service offerings of our vendors, DCITRAQ has a fully integrated and proprietary Knowledge Base that will empower clients to research and view various vendor related content such as sales and marketing collateral, white papers, promotions among other helpful content that our vendors upload into the system. DCITRAQ is revolutionizing the way clients source colocation, cloud and related services.
EC: As we head into 2020, what would you identify as the one or two major trends in the colocation industry?
DB: One of the major trends that is well underway that will continue to have a big impact on the colocation industry is the proliferation of Edge Computing. Public Cloud’s biggest disruption to the world of colocation beginning about ten years ago was largely driven by the concept of ubiquity. Clients were told that it really doesn’t matter where their servers are and the obsession with location, location, location that dominated the world of colocation from its onset was no longer a major driver in data center deployment. Today, however, as Big Data, highly bandwidth intensive applications and streaming media continues to be a demand driver, this growth coupled with consumer obsession with low latency and performance, has forced companies to push their processing power closer to the edge near their customers and subscribers. This local focus has also made the physical location of their servers matter again. This is great news for the colocation industry of course and it can be evidenced with how the major public cloud providers are scrambling to address this trend. One such example is the launch of AWS outposts which can be colocated at the edge in a specific data center.
Blockchain is yet another major potential demand driver for data center infrastructure services. The optimal design that makes Blockchain such a secure architecture rests heavily on being able to manage the physical location and controls of the Blockchain nodes. This is best achieved by deploying geographically diverse colocation sites for the various nodes as opposed to a public cloud application. So in this architecture, location matters yet again.
Meanwhile, we are also just seeing the tip of the iceberg from IoT (Internet of Things), IIoT (Industrial IoT) and IoE (Internet of Everything) as those technologies promise to be a big part of shaping our future and everyday lives. As major industries like manufacturing continue to adopt these technologies, we are looking at major plants, warehouses and distribution centers deploying these IoT devices throughout their operations. This will undoubtedly create major demand for Big Data storage and processing at the edge which would further fuel data center infrastructure demand.
Element Critical is a premier data center provider with facilities in Northern VA, Chicago, and Silicon Valley. If you’d like to learn more about our capabilities, contact us to start a conversation.
