A Digital Adieu

Those who follow the news from Digital Realty Trust closely may have recently read that I have decided to leave the company to focus a bit more on some personal work/life balance issues.  With this move comes a new role that I will talk more of in the coming days and weeks.

I would like to take a moment and talk about my time and experience at Digital and what I believe to be some industry ground breaking work that is being done there.   The first thing that strikes me about the company is the quality and dedication of the people.  The staff within the organization are incredibly committed to both providing the best product  (in terms of engineering and construction) along with an obsessive regimen around Operations.  In my role running all aspects of design, construction, and operations, this passion showed through every single day.    It was a delight to work with such motivated people. 

From the outside it might be difficult to gauge just how significant this operation truly is.   As many of you know I have run some large programs before, but they all pale in comparison to the size, scope, and complexity of the work happening at DLR.  Its one thing to be building a couple of very large facilities and quite another to be building out tens upon tens of data center construction initiatives across the world.   There simply is no organization in the world that has to construct, manage and operate more data centers, period.   In addition to these “block and tackling” items there is also a healthy focus on modularization and evolving data center design and prototyping.   This focus is not just about driving additional efficiencies in power and cooling, but also in cost, and time to deploy.  A true intersection of business requirements.  On top of all this you add the Pod Architecture Services program and Build to Suit program which additionally extend Digitals capabilities to those looking to build “Do it Yourself” (DIY) Data Centers.   In short, it was a ton of fun with incredible opportunities for growth.

In my time at the company I have focused on driving additional streamlining efforts and operational rigor across the board and have helped set the engineering direction of the company.   This work has already begun to pay some significant dividends and I am sure will likely continue well into the future.   But let me be clear – The success of these initiatives will be delivered by a top rate team with few peers in the industry.  

In short, Digital was a great experience and I feel blessed in having made some life-long friends there as well.   So as I start a new chapter in my life, a bid fond adieu to a Data Center Juggernaut and look boldly forward to what is to come, for me and for Digital.

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