Chad Muckenfuss leads a fireside chat with Mike Kowalski, Telarus’s solution architect for data center and cloud, discussing the company’s ambitious goal to double their data center business. The conversation covers the massive impact of AI on data center demand, with opportunities ranging from traditional colocation deals to multi-megawatt deployments. Mike explains how the traditional colo market (10-500 kilowatts) often provides better commission rates for partners compared to wholesale deals above 500 kilowatts. They discuss key market drivers including VMware/Broadcom licensing changes pushing cloud repatriation, where companies move workloads back from expensive hyperscaler clouds to more cost-effective hybrid models. The session covers data center tiers and certifications, power availability challenges especially on the West Coast, and strategic approaches for engaging SMB and mid-market customers. Mike emphasizes starting conversations around overall cloud and data center strategy rather than pitching specific products, targeting IT directors who need help with research and decision-making. The discussion concludes with plans to continue this focus into Q1 2026 with additional resources and supplier partnerships.
Transcript is auto-generated.
Well, thank you, Jen. Appreciate that. And, I appreciate everybody joining here on a holiday, a very short holiday week. I think a lot of people are out tomorrow traveling to, friends and family and all that fun stuff.
But we’d like to touch on the data center space, and we’d like to really go through and you’re gonna see a theme happening here. So before I let Mike introduce himself, I just wanna talk about the plan for December, in and around cloud, and then also going into q one and twenty twenty six overall. So my goal here in stepping into my new role is to double the data center business that we do here at Telarus. And in order to do that, we need the the right people in the right places.
And one of those key people is Mike Kowalski. And many of you know his expertise in and around cloud, but he has a very, very strong background in the data center space. So he, from a SA standpoint, a solution architect standpoint, will be heading up our data center practice, moving into twenty twenty six here. So we’re happy to have him join us today and go into some of the thoughts and and concerns and and other things happening in the data center space that really make it a intriguing and profitable place to begin to develop some business here.
So with that, Mike, why don’t you do a a quick introduction?
Yeah. Thanks, Jen. Mike Kowalski, solution architect for data center and cloud. People always kinda think that might be an interesting mix, and I like to explain to them that, you know, the cloud is out there living in a very big data center.
It’s just that you don’t have to see it, manage it, touch it, feel it, but all of that is physical infrastructure. So me representing both the data center side as well as the cloud side allows me to have that insight to really where is that line of delineation and where does it make sense to put things in the cloud and where does it make sense to put things in data center. And, you know, it’s different for every client that we talk to. It’s different for every TA that we work with based on their experience.
And so I I love this topic. I’m very happy to be here today. I think we have a couple of good talking points. We have no special guests other than ourselves.
And really, how do we double the data center business? We get people more comfortable with selling data center. So please light up the chat with questions. We’re just gonna have a fireside chat here. Chad, let’s kick it off.
Yeah. I think the the biggest thing there is really what’s on the top of everyone’s mind because we don’t stop talking about it is AI. And AI has had a dramatic impact on the data center, filling a lot of existing data center space and talking about how we’re going to power, build more data center space. All of those things have had a dramatic impact. What do you see happening right now and at least for the next maybe two or three years in the data center space in and around AI?
Well, I’m I I I like all opportunities equally. And I think with the new AI workloads that are coming out and these these magnificently large, huge deals that say we are taking down megawatts of space and power, those are those are amazing. And those are things that we have been training all of these years to take on. And I think with AI, it might be a smaller subset of these really large opportunities.
Really, to take down even a megawatt of of power, you need to have an an incredible amount of equipment. So when you’re talking two, three, four, twenty, forty, sixty, we have hundred megawatt opportunities in the pipeline now. These are really kind of like the early days of the Internet. People are just making a mad dash to find the next best thing, and they’re building it and they’re deploying it.
So I would never want to discard anybody from saying, don’t chase this business. It’s real business. It’s out there. It is as we’ll learn through this conversation.
A little getting a little bit harder to just instantly place, but we’ll go through some strategies that we have on on how to how to accomplish that when you do find these whales of deals.
But AI is the conversation that everybody has to have on the of their mind. Everybody has to have a strategy on how to deal with the question, what are you doing for AI? And again, data center is no different. Don’t necessarily need to start a business then take down a hundred megawatts.
We’re just as happy with the ten kilowatts, the hundred kilowatts. Right? Yep. They all fit in there someplace.
Yeah. And I think that touches on on where we’re gonna go next, but I wanna answer a question from Joseph in the chat here. Joseph, you’re jumping the gun a little bit. We were gonna touch on this towards the end, but I’ll address it now is, why don’t we put together available power and breakdown of of data centers availability on a on a national scale?
Well, we are doing that. And we are in the in the in the midst of developing a tool that should roll out here. Hopefully, by the end of the year, will be a part of Telarus Hub that we all of our data center suppliers are contributing usually twice a month, but at least once a month on what power availability and space availability they have here in specifically North America is where we’re starting. So the US and Canada, and they’re contributing that.
And we have a tool that will be able to search that. So if you have a need in the greater Dallas area for specific power request or specific space request, you can put it in there. You could see what availability is there on your own type of search. What what will happen though is that to verify that availability is there, it will kick it back to us here at Telarus, and the and the sales engineering team will be able to verify that for you.
So a little bit ahead of the game for the for the chat line here. So we’ll we’ll bring it back, and be able to talk about a couple of things that you you just mentioned, which is one of the key things that I see happening out there, out outside of this explosive growth is you mentioned it right at the end, the ten kilowatt deals, the hundred kilowatt deals, the fifty kilowatt deals. That mid market space is growing tremendously. And I think there’s a couple of drivers that are that are really pushing that forward, but there’s a plenty of space for the traditional colo sale.
And in my experience, and and Mike, you can agree with or disagree with this, but in my experience, selling a couple of twenty to fifty kilowatt deals helps the partners get paid more than if they would in a multi megawatt deal. Can you explain the difference what happens when we jump to multi megawatt versus the traditional colo space of that ten to a hundred kilowatts and maybe five hundred kilowatts?
Yeah. The threshold right there is at five hundred kilowatts for most for most providers, not for all of them, but for most. And what they consider that at that point is wholesale.
And wholesale is one of these things where you can buy in bulk and you can get a discount, but as a TA, you’re not going to get paid as much.
I I wrote a presentation internally for our sales engineering team, as you know, and I said, why is the data center bad business for the channel?
And it it’s kind of a play on words because it is not bad business. It’s an amazing business. It is, there are stories and and maybe some folks on this call that sold a cabinet fifteen years ago that they’re still getting paid on it. Just one cabinet.
Now, just imagine, if it was fifteen hundred dollars or or two dollars zero and they’re getting a check every single month for one hundred and fifty bucks, two hundred bucks, three hundred bucks for fifteen years, that is a good business to be in. So imagine selling two or three or four or five. And, you know, don’t hold me to these rates. I’m an engineer.
I’m I’m not in finance. But sometimes the those rates drop to two percent or four percent of the MRR. Now versus a thirteen, fourteen, fifteen percent if it’s not a wholesale deal. So if you do the math and you sell a two hundred thousand kilowatt deal or two excuse me, two hundred kilowatt deal, you’re looking at commissions within the thousands of dollars per month.
If you sold a two megawatt deal, it’s it might be really close to about the same. So, you don’t wanna shy away from those deals, but they are certainly very lucrative to be in that five hundred kilowatt and less range.
Yeah. And and what I see also is, again, just the availability. We’re we’re years out from a lot of the multi megawatt availability that’s that’s being built and and potentially hasn’t even broken ground yet. They’re just talking about space and and where the grids can be boosted up, to be able to support that type of power.
So the traditional sale is is there. It’s it’s ready. And we would we want to encourage the partners that are a part of this call today and and all the rest of them in the Teleris portfolio to start looking for opportunities. And one of those opportunities that I see is, the VMware conversation and how VMware is impacting this because the traditional I’ve got a few servers in my office in a closet somewhere.
My joke is always it’s next to a water heater inevitably for whatever reason. But moving that into a colo space and working with some of our suppliers to be able to either move it into their cloud, move it into their colo, and avoid a lot of those pitfalls that that Broadcom keeps throwing out there. What are your thoughts on that, Mike?
Yes. What we’re really starting to see is, we’re getting ready to get ready. And like an AI strategy, you have to have a Broadcom strategy.
That conversation started twelve, eighteen months ago. Well, now those contracts are coming due and these conversations that we’ve continually had, now they’re actually putting action behind it. And the action behind it is we, we like to own and manage our own equipment, but it makes sense to move some of that equipment into a private cloud, not necessarily hyperscaler, but move it into a private cloud so that we can then tie our workloads together.
And that removes a lot of the burden for the licensing, the purchasing of new hardware and things of that nature. And what happens is they’re still maintaining a little a a core piece of infrastructure that they absolutely need to have and manage themselves. So that’s really where the the hybrid cloud piece comes into it. In some instances, we’re having suppliers move into the data center where they’re located. They’re taking over the tenant of their data center. They’re taking over all the power requirements, and they’re and they’re building this out bespoke. So it’s almost like they haven’t really lost anything except for they’ve moved to more of a service.
Yeah.
And that data center is a key component of that because, again, one cabinet, two cabinet, five cabinets, easy business to place.
A thousand cabinets, very difficult. But also if you’re in a hundred cabinets and you wanna move to the cloud, it’s very expensive endeavor. It’s a lot of migration involvement in that. There’s a lot of stress that the workloads will continue to work as as needed.
So some are actually staying with Broadcom and and paying that higher price, but that means that also they’re staying in their colo. So it’s there’s really no loss here with this. It’s a great conversation starter and to walk through the different options that they have, maybe at the end of the day, they just get it out next to the hot water heater and they put it into a qualified facility. Yes. And they go from there. And I’d like to address one of the questions that Glenn just asked is, we’ve been in the data center space for a really long time now. So if you go back ten years and you wanted a cheap data center, you’re going go look at carrier grade type of location.
Lumen is very famous for starting off and they just built data centers, and they had all of just downtown LA has an AT and T facility. There are no windows, but it’s carrier grade. There’s no security. There’s some cooling.
There’s some redundancy, but it’s not where you wanna take your business prospects to show them cool flashy lights. It is a secure building. It’s inexpensive, but it was built inexpensive before the Uptime Institute was was giving these ranking systems. So really back then, if you wanted low cost, you went into a carrier hotel.
Now what we’re in, or excuse me, a carrier grade facility, carrier hotels is something different, but they have now built these facilities so well and so good that a typical data center could support eighteen to thirty kilowatts on the floor with cold aisle, hot aisle containment.
Now the next generation is we’re gonna get a hundred kilowatts per cabinet, a hundred and twenty five, two hundred. We had a conversation that a megawatt is on the table per cabinet. Now these require a lot of new sophisticated technologies. They need the they need the cooling to be built into the facility. They need all of these things.
So really what I think is that carrier grade hook the carrier grade is out.
Everything else is gonna be minimum of tier three, which is absolutely great for ninety nine percent of the workloads. And then that next generation data center is gonna be that multiple hundred kilowatt and greater facilities.
They don’t really exist yet today. This is just as they plan. This is what they’re going to have to support.
Gonna be huge.
Yeah. Yeah. And and there’s some things, you know, I we’re gonna continue, obviously, this discussion here today, but also into the q one of of next year too. Some of the cool things talking about that and looking into the future of where this all goes is, you know, we can touch on I’d like to touch on the Stargate project, some other things where it goes from traditional data center space here on Earth and moving it out to the atmosphere because power is readily available, Cooling is not an issue. That that’s all been resolved. And, and in twenty twenty six, we should have some data center space, based on what Elon Musk is pushing. We should have some of that up there.
So They’re talking gigawatts now. They’re talking about gigawatt capable facilities, whereas up until a few years ago, if you had three hundred megawatts, you you were one of the largest in the world, if not the largest in the world. And now that is just getting blown out of the water. Yeah.
I would like to requalify something that you said a little bit earlier. Sure. We are coming up with some great tools. We have it in beta internally right now.
We use it all the time. We’re continually updating it. Not ready for prime time till next year.
But the reason why we asked to continue to qualify the power with us is we had a facility come online and they made available thirty four megawatts and they have pre sold thirty two of it.
So just because it comes up in the tool on a Tuesday doesn’t mean it’s gonna be there on a Wednesday. And I think that’s gonna be part of the strategy conversation that we have today is how do we secure this space? The space is easy. How do we secure the power so that my my customer can move in and start taking advantage of some of these new, facilities coming online?
Yeah. And and, Vin just mentioned here too, the mini nuclear reactors are something that it’s still a ways away, but in looking at what they’re utilizing to power that, it it eliminates the risk of meltdowns and and all of that in these in these small nuclear reactors. SNR is the is the the buzz term for that. So all of that type of thing is is cool cool to look at and and fun to talk about, and, I think we’ll we’ll include that in in later hit series calls. But going back to the chat, what I’d like to, to look at here is, you know, one of the key things is data centers being in compliance and certified west, Midwest, and and east locations. One of the key things for the data centers that we bring to the table is that certification process.
Mike, can you kinda go through a breakdown, like tier one, tier two, tier three, what that means and and how that helps in our partners assessing?
Yeah. Yeah. So, certainly, when we bring a supplier on board and they offer data center services, they have a rigorous qualification just to be on our portfolio sheet. And so we we take care of a lot of this heavy lifting for you.
Sometimes we’ll get a call and say, hey, do you support such and such? And we just they’re not part of the portfolio. It’s maybe because we haven’t gotten to them yet because there hasn’t been enough demand, location, whatever that may be. But more than likely, they’re just not up to standards as far as how data centers are are modern data centers are built and maintained.
This is a guideline that was really established by the Uptime Institute.
Anything worth taking a look at would be tier three. Tier one would be the hot water heater. Tier two would be the carrier grade. Tier three would mean natural redundancies within the infrastructure as far as cooling, as far as the water is concerned, they would have, the facility would have to have certain build qualifications.
Now let me also say that certifying each facility costs about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars So more common than not is they follow the tier three guidelines for construction, but then they may not actually get it certified.
Then it goes tier four and then it goes tier four plus platinum elite, whatever. It’s it’s a range that a data center out in Las Vegas to remain nameless, great data center, but they have a very small footprint. They invest a ton of money into it, but they can afford to put these certifications around them because they have maybe eight locations. If you take other players in the space that have two hundred plus or or a hundred or even fifty, gets to be a very expensive endeavor. So we’ll go through and qualify and make sure it’s a minimum tier three and then go from there so that they know that they’re getting into a qual a quality location.
Yeah. I see a lot of questions in the chat asking about some discovery questions, and we will gladly provide those to, everybody that’s joined today, and we’ll have them out on Telarus Hub as well. We’re not gonna go through those today because the you know, we, frankly, I don’t have them all finished yet. And from the other side of that, we wanna make sure that it’s tailored to the people that you’re talking to.
So the enterprise conversation, as as Mike has been speaking to, is way different than the SMB and mid market conversation of a half a rack, a quarter of a rack, you know, a third of a third, one third cabinet, that type of thing. So we’ll break down some of the some of the key factors in what to look for and some of those key questions, and we’ll have that out for you as well. So I think one of those things that that we really see time and time again is I I wanted to touch on this is is the cloud repay patriot repatriation. Easy for me to say.
Yeah. Right. So all of that and and, again, it was mentioned in the chat too from a cost perspective.
A lot of businesses jump to full hyperscaler cloud, specifically in and around COVID, post COVID of, hey. I’m gonna jump into Azure. It’s easier. I’m already subscribing to Microsoft three sixty five for all all of my employees.
Let me just throw everything up in Azure. And then all of a sudden, the costs just grow and grow and grow. Whereas if they were to bring some of the key applications back and and leverage data center or colo space and host those on a on a local, semi local, in a hybrid model where Microsoft three sixty five still exists for all of your day to day usage, your OneDrive, your all those things. But the key applications that you’re utilizing are are local and run better, run faster, etcetera.
Yep. Can you talk to that a little bit and and see and explain what you’re seeing out there?
Yeah. I I love the name repatriation because it makes me feel like we’re coming back to America, and we’re we’re going to make this ours again, and it’s going to be fantastic. And it took me a minute to learn how to say that as well.
I I think just for the basics of it, and this is probably no surprise to anybody, but when one of your clients wants to go all in with Azure and AWS, we’ll support that. If we’re in part of that process and it is the best method forward and platform forward, we’ll support it. Do you get paid well for that? You don’t really get paid for the infrastructure piece, which may be the largest dollar amount of that opportunity, But you will get some commissions based on the level of support, different features such as network, possibly network connections, security, so on and so forth. But repatriation is amazing because it’s, hey, we did all in with the hyperscalers, and damn, it got expensive. And the governance is not there, and the sprawl is just incredible.
We need to get a little bit better control over this. Well, that’s fantastic because we can provide the data center space. You can sell capital hardware through some of our suppliers. You can sell dedicated private cloud as a service through our suppliers.
We can take a look at that environment and say, look, you you have eighty percent of this workload is stable. We should move it into a fixed infrastructure where you could have cost constraints, governance, all of those things that you get when it’s under your roof. And you can if it costs a dollar day one and use it all the time, it’ll cost a dollar day two and so on and so forth. You don’t use it, it still costs a dollar.
So you have to really make sure that you’re using it well. Right.
You don’t get that with hyperscalers.
I was going through an opportunity and their budget was forty thousand dollars a month. And we built a solution that was right at thirty seven. It was fitting well, but I asked the question, you know, this doesn’t include any egress fees. How much are you gonna use it?
That blew it out of the water. They’re like, we’re gonna use it a lot. We have a lot of customers that are gonna depend on this. That put the bill up another fifty percent, pushed it way past.
So we had to look at some repatriation to get that into some fixed infrastructure that they could then have better control, cost control over, and it did the same thing. Now they’re still pushing workloads as needed into hyperscalers, but that’s the beauty of it these days. You can do it transparently. There’s all sorts of options available, and we can have that conversation with the client to make them feel comfortable about moving in that direction.
Yeah. And and and one of the key things I think that we see in in that, you know, that hybrid cloud model is is exactly that. Like, those egress fees are something that’s a lot of times not considered, and it’s brought a lot of of expense to these to these smaller again, I’m focused on the SMB and that mid market space that can push those projects just as you said, way out of budget and way out of line. Yeah.
One of the things that I think is happening here, and and we we brushed against it in the beginning of the conversation here though, is the the projects specifically that are happening for new data centers in and around the US, but specifically in the Pacific Northwest. I know you have some some good knowledge about what’s going on there and what’s happening. And can you tell us pros and cons of what’s happening? Maybe some of the struggles that are happening?
Yeah. So I’m in the West, so I’m a little bit tighter with the market.
And I hear things, I talk to my partners all the time. There are I had some great news. One of our data center suppliers currently in the portfolio is bringing fifty megawatts online middle of next year. That’s great.
I can sell that because we have a line of people looking for big power deployments. The bad news is they won’t sell it to just one client. So if you’re looking for twenty, thirty, forty megawatts, they’re not gonna do that. It it would really upset their sales team for one and and two, it it’s a big gamble to sell that all to one client.
Well, bad news. Silicon Valley Power doesn’t have the ability to turn the lights on. So the building four hundred thousand square feet, by the way, there there’s two of these two different suppliers. But the story is the same.
They have not received a green light to electrify the building yet because the the grid just won’t support it. We’re seeing building moratoriums in Pacific Northwest because their waiting time is two to five years for new power. Now, if you got grandfathered in and the building is going up, that’s fantastic. But they may find themselves in the same position where they have the building complete and they can’t get occupancy because they can’t turn the lights on.
So those are things that we’re keeping an eye on. Now, how do we find some of these bigger patches of power? We continually are qualifying new suppliers to come into the portfolio. And with that, I have empty data centers that are twelve months from tenants.
You sign today, you could get sixty megawatts in twelve months and you can take it all. They wanna sell these. They’re shells currently, but we run into these more times than not because we have a great networking team.
Brinton has really done a fantastic job of partnering with our TAs where they’re saying we just bought fifty acres of land in nowhere, Kentucky, and we’re building a data center.
Well, we can provide the network services for that through our TAs, but then we’re also thinking, can we get on board with this project? Because you’re literally at the point where the shovel is going into the dirt. What’s the capacity going to look like? How are they gonna build this out with a focus on AI.
So we always get the inside track to where some of these facilities are, and we are pre selling some of them before they even get the walls up. So if you have those big deals, don’t shy away from them. But if you’re looking to place deals at least in the West Coast, we have to be very prescriptive on how we attack that, where we place it, and the lead time to to move in. We need to be realistic.
It’s not gonna be tomorrow. It it’s gonna be a little while.
Yeah. And what what I’m seeing from from that aspect of things, from a grid perspective or a power perspective is really kind of the Rocky Mountains east is where a lot of this is happening, where they can they can get this stuff built. The grid is stable enough to be able to do a multi megawatt installation. A lot of them are either, you know, either in the in the south, like in Texas. They they keep building them nonstop down there. Texas, as we all know, has their own grid, not not necessarily completely connected to the rest of the national grid. And then up, in and around the Great Lakes, we see a lot of them too, from a cooling perspective, a water perspective up there that we see a lot kind of breaking ground.
I think as we as we begin to bring this home here over the next couple of minutes, Mike, what I’d what I’d like to touch on a bunch of people were asking as far as, information on on really how to open the door. What are some key questions from, from that that SMB mid market? What are some key questions to talk to the, the owners of those companies? Most of them don’t have usually a large IT team, if any at all, and they’re trying to figure out what to do as they’re looking towards, and they just keep getting bombarded by AI and and all the other things.
I’m I’m glad we’re ending on this question because I think it’s really important that you don’t go out there and try to sell colocation. Don’t go out there and try to sell data center. Don’t go out there and try to sell desktop as a service. That is too narrow minded of an approach so that it’s easy to get a no. What you want to talk to people about is how is your cloud and data center strategy working for you today?
Because then you’re gonna get a response.
And if that response is our our cloud bill keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, then we think let’s move them into a fixed infrastructure solution that could include data center, could include dedicated private cloud, could include x, y, and z. So have a strategy of just the conversational awareness of how is your current environment treating you? How do you have a good good control over the cost of your environment? Is your environment able to scale with the business?
Is your environment too big for the business and you overpurchase? Right? If if you can have a strategy around how is the current infrastructure and their, their spend or their support. Right.
You can pick a topic. You can pick all the topics, but make it open ended and start talking about that strategy. I say the same thing with AI. We’re not gonna solve the AI problems overnight, but let’s have a conversation about what their strategy would sound like if they had a stakeholder come over and ask you.
They’re standing at your desk. What’s our AI strategy? Let’s get one in place. What what is our data center and cloud strategy?
Let’s get one in place. Let’s talk about it because this is gonna take months to establish, months to execute on, so we should start sooner rather than later.
Yeah. And I think that’s key is is the planning aspect of things. And and that’s why we’re talking about this now in December because the goal is to continue this discussion, and I just saw Jeff’s comment here.
The goal is to continue this discussion into q one. So we want to hear this feedback, see what you’re looking at, you know, what you’re running into, what the needs are for our partners out there to begin these conversations.
Because the reality is, yes, we can still sell connectivity. Yes, we can still sell UCaaS and CCaaS, but the the customer base is becoming more and more and more cloud centric. And their their needs are getting more in the cloud because they’re just being pushed that way by their software as a service companies Right. Yep.
Every application that they’re utilizing, by the fragmentation of the workforce, meaning that, you know, their their employees may be scattered across the country like a Telarus model where we really don’t have offices that we go to anymore. We all work out of our our homes or remote offices occasionally. That type of model, pushes everything continually more and more into the cloud. So we wanna continue this discussion.
You will absolutely see more of Mike and myself and several others as we we bring in key suppliers that we have and and all the rest of that into these conversations. But we’re looking forward to the next few months here. And, you know, I really appreciate your insights today, Mike. And and, I wanna thank everybody for joining us in this fireside chat.
We’ve got a great supplier that’s gonna be stepping in here momentarily that Jen’s gonna introduce. But most importantly, I wanna wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving. You know, we go into this holiday. It’s it’s my favorite holiday of the year, bar none, because everybody just comes together, enjoys a great meal, walks away, watches some football, and it’s just a relaxing, typically four day weekend.
So, thank you for for joining us today. Mike, you wanna have any parting words here to the group?
No. Just reach out early and often with me. I’m here to help. My job day day in and day out with Teleris is to help the folks that are on this call. Let me know if you want me to help you build a strategy, how you can open some doors with your current clients. I am here. Please use me.
Yep. Thank you. Jen, back to you and see who we have here joining us with with the supplier today.
I will get to that in two seconds, but if you guys have patience for it, there were a couple of, like, spirit of questions that you’re getting asked through the chat that I think it would be nice to sort of take it really back to basics. I’m so excited now, Chad, for the q one data center focus because there’s clearly a tremendous amount of interest in this area and a lot of opportunity. So thanks for all that conversation that you guys had. There were a lot of questions that were about key persona and sort of ICP, like what’s the ideal customer profile?
So I think as we’re wrapping up this conversation, just to take it back to basics, Mike, if you were gonna ask that question, which is, hey. What’s your data center strategy, and how’s that working for you? Who are the people in a company that you’re speaking to? Let’s talk about mid enterprise.
And then, like, what are their titles? And then also, are there specific verticals or areas where you would focus if you if there was an adviser who was gonna go out and try these conversations for the first time?
Yeah. Larger enterprise will always have a dedicated team, and they’ll pro they’ll most likely have a a a VP of infrastructure that manages all of that. But if you go in SMB, it’s going to be the director of IT that is working to manage the maybe some cloud deployment, maybe some on prem deployment, maybe a little bit of colo. But I think that mid tier company is going to have that director of IT that is in charge of all of the decision making process and the way that they get things done is they’re doing a ton of research to to to qualify the locations, to qualify the platforms. So, if we’re able to walk in and take that off their plate, I call it the heavy lifting. We’ll we’ll come in and do all that heavy lifting for you. On our next phone call, I’m going to give you three options so that you can see who’s out there, what the technology looks like, what the price point is at, and allow you to make an informed buying decision.
They can take that information verbatim and go to their stakeholders and say, this is the research that’s been completed. This is why we need to move into X, Y, or Z facility and they have they they look like a shining star because usually in that space, they don’t have ten people in the IT department. They they’ve they’ve got Bob and maybe two other people that are juniors and that’s it and if we can make Bob look good, then, he’s going to recommend you to others in his space. He’s gonna he’s gonna become very loyal.
And then he’s gonna call you up and ask you questions that has nothing to do with data center. They’re gonna start asking you the other IT questions. This just came across my desk. What what are people doing to satisfy that?
Is there new technology coming out? They just can’t keep up. So if we can inform them and we can make them look great to their leadership, man, that’s that’s an easy sell.
Awesome. Thank you so much. And, Chad, there are also tons of suggestions in there like, hey. Can you make me an FAQ that says this? Can you I think we should pull we should comb through these chat after the session because it’ll help us create toolkits for folks for q one.
Yeah. I agree. I think, we take all of that seriously. And so all of the comments in and around that, including an overview of what’s happening for, like, each of our suppliers and what they specialize in and how they focus on that. I think it’s one of those things that is is really key to, helping open those doors and, again, additions additional information to those questions that, that Mike outlined. So we will absolutely be providing all of that, and we appreciate the feedback.
Thank you guys both so much for being here on Thanksgiving week, and thanks for the great session. Everybody was very engaged and had tons of questions, so it was good stuff. Thanks a lot, you guys.
Yeah. You got it, Jen. Thank you.
Take care.