Data Center POST Interview with Evocative CEO Derek Garnier

In a recent interview with Data Center POST, Derek Garnier, the CEO of Evocative, a leading global provider of Internet infrastructure services, shared his insights on the ever-evolving digital infrastructure industry. With over 35 years of experience in corporate strategy and building successful companies, Derek emphasized the importance of flexibility and scalability to meet the changing needs of enterprise customers. Whether it’s public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environments, Evocative is well-equipped to provide solutions that cater to its clients’ unique requirements. Read on to discover more about Derek’s approach to the industry and what he hopes to achieve at ITW 2023.

Data Center POST (DCP) Question: International Telecoms Week is one of the industry’s largest and most important events for the year, what type of company do you work for and what are you looking forward to accomplishing at ITW 2023? 

Derek Garnier, CEO at Evocative (DG) Answer: Evocative is a global provider of digital infrastructure services. We specialize in colocation, network, bare metal, and private cloud services throughout the US with additional nodes in EMEA. For us, ITW represents a chance to connect with customers and partners while hearing from industry experts and comparing notes with our counterparts.

DCP Q: The first ITW Keynote panel features some of the industry’s largest players sharing their perspectives of the industry. What is the top trend that you and your company has its sights on, and why? 

DG A: Evocative is primarily focused on servicing the enterprise market, and as such, we look for trends that are either created or adopted by the enterprise, driving their compute, communications, and capacity needs. With the breadth of our product portfolio, any trend leading to data growth, whether in a public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, bare metal, or hosted solution, is of interest.

DCP Q: As the global wholesale infrastructure industry continues to evolve, what are you experiencing from enterprise users about how they need to be supported (or technologies they need developed?)

DG A: Scalability, reliability, and flexibility are all attributes our customers require. They want to know that their providers will properly support what they sell and that they can grow with them as their business grows. As technology changes, products and services have to be adaptable to the customer environment, which requires flexibility. Very few enterprise clients want a widget from a vendor, they prefer a solution from a partner.

DCP Q: The cloud continues to be a hot topic. Some say it’s continuing to grow even bigger, others are saying businesses are starting to repatriate from the cloud into managed infrastructure, such as bare metal. What are you experiencing in your business and how are you adapting to that? 

DG A: Data continues to grow. Whether it lives in a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid environment, we can count on the Internet growing and evolving and the customer base increasing their data consumption and output. Macro-level trends are not one-size-fits-all with enterprise customers, so even as some are moving from public clouds into hybrid cloud/colocation environments, others are moving from colocation into hybrid colocation/cloud environments. This ebb and flow is heavily dependent upon the specific customer, their business model, their applications and their financial models. Evocative will sell more colocation. More network. More bare metal. If we do that with a public cloud partner, that is still growth.

DCP Q: What makes digital infrastructure smart and sustainable and what is your business doing to help bring the industry forward in this fashion? 

DG A: Our industry continues to innovate. As an industry, we began to automate processes immediately. We then began centralizing data through DCIM. We then started correlating data through simple analytics. Now AI and machine learning have moved us toward predictive analysis. As the evolution continues, we look forward to bringing in additional sources of data from outside the data center or even from our industry ecosystem for better predictions that can serve the industry. Evocative is collecting and analyzing data and is looking forward to the collaborative process.

DCP Q: What are you most looking forward to sharing about your company at ITW 2023? 

DG A: Evocative is in a unique spot. We are very flexible and look more for partnerships than merely viewing our industry as a competitive landscape. There are plenty of win-win scenarios when people are willing to sit at the table and discuss openly.