Joanna Soucy is an experienced marketing and public relations executive specializing in driving business growth and technical content development. As Executive Vice President of Brand Strategy for Aligned, Soucy is responsible for implementing brand positioning, promotional activities, public relations, and other business strategies through multiple communication channels in order to maximize the reach and effectiveness of Aligned’s mission, vision, and values.
Prior to joining Aligned, Soucy served as Vice President of Strategic Development at iMiller Public Relations (iMPR), where she oversaw account management, client services, and project management teams in executing all aspects of PR and marketing strategy as well as customer service and business development activities.
As EVP of Brand Strategy, you have unique insight into Aligned’s mission, vision, and values. What do you see as Aligned’s core tenets, and how do these inform your business strategy? Has this branding and messaging evolved over time?
Our core tenets have been rooted in innovation, sustainability, and what we call “unreasonable hospitality” (more on that shortly) from day one. I remember when I joined Aligned six years ago, “innovation” was still somewhat of a scary word in the industry. It was somewhat synonymous with risk. Today, striking a balance between innovation and reliability is crucial in a mission-critical industry like data centers. We now have to innovate in order to accelerate speed to market and meet our customers’ requirements—all without leaving operational reliability and exceptional service in the dust. So, the concept of creative solutioning is really a core tenet of Aligned, and over time we are investing even more in research and development, pushing the boundaries of data center design, and pioneering new technologies. Over time, we’ve been thinking creatively across all aspects of the business, not just technology, in order to be agile and flexible in a truly unprecedented time of growth and evolution in our industry.
With respect to “unreasonable hospitality,” I’d love to say we came up with the concept, but it was coined by Will Guidara (a man who turned a struggling two-starred bistro into the World’s Best Restaurant in 2017). This ethos is all about going above and beyond in service and exceeding expectations by providing experiences that are very different and memorable. At Aligned, we use this concept as our guiding light in every interaction. You may not think data centers and restaurants have much in common, but customer experience, employee satisfaction, and community outreach go a long way for the success of both.
Finally, in terms of sustainability: At Aligned, being stewards of the environment has been baked into our business from day 1. We also understand that sustainability is not only good for the planet, but it’s also good for business. This mentality has enabled us to propose and implement sustainability solutions that make us attractive to a variety of stakeholders – from customers and investors, to partners, community members, and potential employees. We’re not just considering sustainable technologies and designs, either—we’re also improving sustainability in every aspect of our planning, construction, and operations. We want every data center we build to be both sustainable and profit-generating.
Community outreach also seems to play an important role for Aligned. How does Aligned build community engagement into the foundations of the business, and what are some success stories?
I think every business should be a good corporate citizen. On one hand, that means sticking to your word, providing for the people you serve, and strengthening your brand’s reputation, but on the other hand, it also means working closely and directly with the communities in which you operate. The data center industry has historically played a relatively quiet—yet vital—role in powering our digital world, often operating behind the scenes. While we enable countless aspects of modern life, the public’s understanding of our industry remains limited. It’s crucial that we proactively educate the public about our role, our impact, and the exciting opportunities that the data center industry offers. It’s incredibly important to build strong relationships with our communities.
I think Aligned really excels in building community engagement into the foundations of our business surrounds economic development. Think of it like the Whole Foods effect or the Starbucks effect. If you’re a homeowner and these businesses arrive in your neighborhood, you probably see it as an advantage because property values tend to go up. Data centers can provide a similar effect. For starters, a data center in a neighborhood means more opportunities for renewable energy and alternative power options. It also means new career opportunities, site redevelopment, and more tax revenue and charitable giving that can be funneled back into community assets, like school systems. For example, take our new site in Perkins Township, Ohio. We recently redeveloped a former WWII-era factory site there, and the community has been thrilled with the sustainable renovations and all the new job opportunities. Likewise, we’re also partnering with local schools and organizations like the Nomad Futurist Foundation to educate younger generations about data centers and the different career opportunities they involve. We’ve had a lot of incredible successes through these programs. We’ve had people from all walks of life come in, get trained up and appropriately certified, and then co-manage data center sites.
Aligned helps deliver some of the most innovative platforms and critical services is use today, and with this great achievement comes great responsibility. How is Aligned positioned to meet the needs of customers, and how do you see the industry as a whole working to meet these needs?
At Aligned, our strength not only comes from our core values but also our ability to deliver to them. We’ve got great infrastructure, great capital, and great people—all of which work in tandem to ensure we can provide innovative solutions that can pivot, scale, and flex as and when needed according to shifting customer needs and requirements. For example, on the infrastructure front, our innovations in air and liquid cooling enable better adaptability for our customers and the next-generation applications they will be deploying. Likewise, on the people front, I’m genuinely impressed by the level of talent we’ve been able to hire and the rate at which we’re growing.
What is your core brand message, and how do you ensure it resonates with your target audience?
I’ve already discussed innovation a lot, which is a massive part of our core message. Another key aspect of our central messaging is flexibility and agility. As our CEO Andrew Schaap has said, we’re steering a big ship with a small rudder. At such a fast-growth company, we’re expanding at an unprecedented pace, but it’s important we maintain that ability to steer and move the rudder quickly and effectively in order to continue to meet new demands. Having the infrastructure that solves for some of the challenges and requirements of today is not enough at the rate that the environment in the industry is changing. So, it’s critical to make sure we’re flexible, from both a technical infrastructure and a business model standpoint, to address not only the demands of today but also the demands of tomorrow.
What emerging trends in the data center industry will impact your brand strategy?
No surprisingly to anyone in our industry: the increased demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). For us, that translates into heightening our flexibility and our cooling innovations in order to provide customers the reassurance that they can be nimble in adapting.
Another aspect of technology that will continue to grow alongside AI is going to be cloud.
In 2025, we’ll also start to see the emergence and growth of agentic AI—a type of AI that exhibits autonomous, goal-directed behavior. This tech thrives in a GPU-based environment, and will further fuel the growth of cloud computing. From a needs perspective, that means we’ll need to consider not only higher densities but also how and where the training and inference for these models can be distributed. In other words, where will infrastructure and computing deployments live? These types of large-scale campuses will be very contingent on power and being close to end users, so a more distributed infrastructure approach will likely be needed to ensure reliable, low-latency service.
Along those lines, we’ll also need to be thinking about alternative power options and how Aligned is solutioning for that. Partnerships will be an important way to cultivate alternative power options and renewable power strategies—as well as resource and site sustainability in general. All this change—unprecedented speed, growth, concepts, and technological abilities—also means we’re looking to be more than just a data center provider. We have evolved from being a provider, a third party, into a trusted partner. When we go into meetings, we’re asking about the challenges customers face today and foresee themselves facing tomorrow. We really want to work with our customers to build creative solutions that will directly meet and address these challenges.
