HawkTalk 51 with Andy Stewart, CEO at Evoque Data Center Solutions

Becoming the CEO of a company is no easy task, especially in the middle of a pandemic. Evoque’s new CEO, Andy Stewart tells us about the process and where he plans to take Evoque in the future. As Evoque’s new CEO, Andy Stewart gives us insight to what it has been like assuming the executive role during this strange time. He comes from a CFO position at TeirPoint from which he can be credited for helping build from its one data center to now having dozens all across the US. He discusses what has led him to this current opportunity and what his plans are for the future of Evoque. If you’re short on time, check out a few of our quick takeaways below. Hyperscale growth has been a trend we’ve seen, but Evoque has a different plan Evoque has been a retail enterprise data center provider since it’s beginning. That’s what they’ve based all of their facilities on and that’s the customer segment they will continue to pursue moving forward. Hyperscale users get a lot of attention, and in that attention are data center providers who look to land those big MW deals. Andy tells us that Evoque plans to pursue and have relationships with the hyperscale companies, but they’re going to keep the enterprise users as their main focus and double down on them for the 2nd half of 2020. Evoque & datacenterHawk both think enterprise activity will grow in the 2nd half of 2020 The enterprise sector of the data center industry was no doubt affected by COVID-19. These enterprise businesses put more focus on the safety of their employees rather than their IT infrastructure needs. As time moves forward and there is more clarity around COVID-19 and what the future will look like, you should expect to see enterprise activity pick back up and make up for the pause in the first half of 2020. The importance of connectivity The decisions of where to put your IT equipment, how to manage your network, how to manage your public cloud are all choices that need to be thought about in the same conversation. When Evoque bought their data centers from AT&T they were faced with the challenge of not being highly connected. Over the last 18 months, Evoque has focused its strategy on bringing in more high quality, globally-connected carriers into their facilities to make them more carrier-neutral and carrier dense. We also talked about… The challenge of becoming a CEO during a pandemic Evoque has data centers in Singapore and Hong Kong, which put them in a position of being able to learn from those first lockdowns and put into practice a more advanced strategy when lockdowns happened in other areas of the world. What data center providers can do to not only help their customers today but also in the future Don’t forget to check out the rest of our HawkTalk's and don’t miss out on our latest release of market data for the data center industry.