Q&A with TelecomNewsRoom’s Contributing Editor, Kathy Xu

Gary Niederpruem is Chief Strategy and Development Officer for Vertiv, where he is responsible for leading the organization’s strategy, business development, M&A and chief of staff functions. Vertiv designs, builds and services critical infrastructure that enables vital applications for data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial facilities.

Gary began his career at Emerson as a Product Specialist in 1996 and has since held progressively senior positions including Product Manager, Director of Account Management and Director of Product Management. In mid-2016, he took on the role of Executive Vice President, Marketing, Strategy and Development.

We recently interviewed Gary about his company’s upcoming attendance at KickStart Europe 2018, which takes place on January 24, in Amsterdam. He also talked about the trend of cloud providers seeking colocation, and how that’s becoming a driver for the use of modular edge facilities that can be deployed quickly and scale as demand grows in a targeted region.

TelecomNewsRoom, Kathy Xu (TNR-KX) Question: What are you most eager to share with attendees at KickStart Europe and to learn from fellow speakers and attendees?

Vertiv, Gary Niederpruem (Vertiv-GN) Answer: Europe is home to some of the most active colocation hubs in the world and we are excited to be participating in the first Kickstart Europe conference to help build on the momentum that exists. We’ll be sharing some of research that we’ve conducted with our enterprise customers on their plans for using colocation in the coming years and what is most important to them in selecting a colocation partner. We’ll also be diving into some of the macro trends that are driving colocation growth to gain insight into what the future might hold. Personally, I’m excited about the opportunity to network with industry leaders and to hear how colocation enhance operating efficiency and manage growth, particularly at the edge providers are using advances in infrastructure technology to.

TNR-KX Q: What shifts in the market are you expecting to see in 2018? What can we do now to prepare?

Vertiv-GN A: One of the data center trends Vertiv identified for 2018 was the increased reliance on colocation by cloud providers who need to move services closer to users to minimize latency. This is just one of the factors driving the growth in modular edge facilities that can be deployed quickly and scale as demand grows in a particular location. In general, we are seeing a move away from large, multi-year development projects with rigid designs to approaches that offer greater capital efficiency and flexibility. With new applications such as AI and autonomous vehicles emerging faster than many expected, the challenge has shifted from simply having enough capacity to having enough capacity in the exact location where it is required with the ability to manage capacity seamlessly from the core to the edge. Today’s infrastructure technologies, especially fully integrated solutions, provide the speed of deployment and flexibility required to accomplish this.

TNR-KX Q: KickStart Europe’s focus is on increasing collaboration across industry subsets to further the industry as a whole. What does that mean to you and what are you doing to help realize that goal?

Vertiv-GN A: Collaboration, across equipment manufacturers and service providers, and across the enterprise, colo and cloud markets, is critical to our ability as an industry to efficiently and cost-effectively meet the growing needs of the market. At Vertiv, we have deep data center expertise that extends from designing, manufacturing and servicing equipment to managing complete data center builds. We are actively collaborating with our customers and industry partners to use that expertise to ensure colocation providers can provide their customers — and their customers’ customers — with uninterrupted access to the digital applications they depend on.

TNR-KX: Thank you for your time today, Gary. Best of luck to you and Vertiv at KickStart Europe. To learn more about Vertiv, click here.