Mallory drives operational excellence and performance optimization for the colocation and interconnection portfolio at Flexential, including data center and network operations, product management, design, construction, engineering, and facilities management. He joined Flexential in 2020 after nearly a decade at Equinix and has more than 20 years of experience building high-performing technical teams for global, hyper-growth technology companies, including UUNET, SAVVIS, Digital Realty, and XO Communications.
Mallory understands Hybrid IT solutions at all scale levels and has strong DNA on interconnection and edge applications, which are Flexential differentiators.
Looking at the outsourcing proposition, how would you say it has evolved for enterprises in the last decade?
On the macro side, the last decade showed early tendencies of outsourcing, with customers pushing more workloads to providers like Flexential, particularly as our portfolio has expanded with our FlexAnywhere™ platform and solutions. On the micro side, the last couple of years have shown an acceleration in this shift due primarily to market-based headwinds from the pandemic and drive to optimize services. When people weren’t allowed to come into the office, the IT infrastructure was greatly impacted, and companies made dynamic operations changes. Those that had started to pivot toward a colocentric, interconnection model already had a distributed architecture and were able to do so more seamlessly. The ones that had not, their whole infrastructure basically shut down when lacking access to laptops, dynamic video conferencing, and latency-sensitive applications, which made a clear blueprint critical. This quantum shift to an interconnection-centric model has been focused on a solution-oriented outcome by considering how to plan for the future and the right way to approach it.
What are the major points these days that are top of mind, for enterprise CIOs?
We focus on three key points: improving efficiency, reducing costs, and increasing reliability.
When improving efficiencies, you analyze your user’s experience, like how it looks for that end worker who is unable to go into the office during pandemic regulations. With a more distributed workforce, take into account that people have different levels of access to Internet and connectivity needs.
When reducing costs, people took a step back during the pandemic to create business efficiencies, starting usually with IT, since it’s intangible and considered more of a cost than revenue center. A small IT company can now feel like the largest provider with distributed architecture that’s utilizing interconnection-centric facilities because of direct connectivity capabilities to network providers they don’t have to buy in a bespoke manner.
