Eric Jacobs has over 20 years of sales leadership experience in the data center, cloud, and telecommunications sectors. As Chief Commercial Officer for Aligned, he is responsible for all facets of sales and solution architecture, including the development of sales and channel go-to-market strategies, execution of contract negotiations, implementation of robust sales support processes to ensure pipeline growth, revenue acquisition / projections, and customer success.
Before joining Aligned, Jacobs worked at QTS Realty Trust as Executive Vice President of Sales. Prior to QTS, Jacobs was Vice President of Sales at CMI, Executive Vice President of Sales and Officer for Pac-West, Senior Director of Enterprise Sales at Zayo Group (formerly AboveNet Communications), and one of the original team members for Nextel Communications, Inc. He is also an active member in a variety of community organizations, including serving as Board Member of the CIO Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for economically disadvantaged students seeking a degree in information technology.
Customer centricity and success is mission-critical to Aligned’s business. How does Aligned work to understand customer needs, and how do you work hand-in-hand with the most sophisticated companies on the planet?
It starts with an appreciation and, frankly, a humility that our customers have a much greater task than we do—they’re managing massive global platforms with multiple applications, operations teams, and complexities. They’re also supporting hundreds of service providers, all with different designs and methods of doing business, which means they don’t often receive perfect forecasting for capacity planning—and they’re subject to multiple engineering design changes even after contracting. So, it’s important to acknowledge that our customers really do require a partner that’s responsive, adaptive, and flexible.
One of our key differentiators is the strength of our engineering and operations teams. While we certainly own real estate and develop it, it’s our innovative, collaborative approaches within these teams that really align with our customers’ challenges. The end goal is obviously to design an efficient, reliable, and sustainable data center that meets customer needs, but so much of those requirements can change and evolve even before we put a shovel into the ground—let alone over the 10 or 15 years of a contract term. So, our ability to serve as a trusted advisor who works hand-in-hand with our customers and engineers to ensure we get the most out of the relationship is what really sets us apart.
Since you joined Aligned in 2018, the company has expanded across new territories and acquired new hyperscale data platforms, like ODATA in Latin America. What strategies have you adopted for ensuring inclusive and seamless working environments as well as customer experience consistencies for cross-continent teams?
We’re very intentional about ensuring that every single customer has the same positive experience with us, regardless of what sites they’re using and what location they’re in. First and foremost, I think it starts with hiring the right people—professionals who take ownership and have not only a strong technical aptitude but also a passion for serving the customer in a way that is standardized with Aligned’s values. How we onboard and train our employees is a big part of ensuring inclusivity and consistency. It’s a comprehensive, six-month onboarding experience around who we are and how we work.
While we hope that means customer experiences will be standardized across the entire platform, there are of course certain variances when it comes to countries and cultures, and we really want to keep the strength of those nuances as well. We can’t do things the exact same way in every single country, so there are some unique situations in doing business in certain parts of the world where you have to respect those differences and leverage culture strengths for the benefit of the customer.
We also don’t outsource our operations staff; they’re all Aligned employees, which provides significant control around the customer experience. Furthermore we have a process we follow: an internal audit called AMMO (or “Aligned Maintenance Management and Operations”). This audit is performed by an additional team of security, technical operations, and quality assurance engineers who assess our team at each location and verify they’re following common processes to ensure customers everywhere have the same experience. Our acquisition of ODATA is a good example of one plus one equals three—a concept we use internally to illustrate our synergy, where the combined effect of two things is greater than the sum of their individual parts. We’ve been able to standardize many things across the entire platform, like the supply chain and data center designs. Still, we need to ensure maximum flexibility to make room for specific countries and the different processes, laws, and operation standards they require.
With the constantly evolving digital society in which we operate, flexibility is a big industry buzzword. Why does flexibility matter to the customer, and how is Aligned helping customers plan for the future?
Flexibility is absolutely critical. Real estate and buildings are relatively inflexible, yet the customers’ needs are not. Especially in this age of artificial intelligence (AI), with the advancement of new chips and applications as well as changes in power and cooling systems, customers require a constant ability to adapt. Today we’re on the verge of probably one of the greatest technological revolutions of our time—in many ways, I think it rivals the Internet. We’re going to see AI impact so many facets of our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Think about if you could go back to the early 90s and imagine how the Internet would be as involved in our lives as it is today, 20 years later. Now think about that in terms of AI: We’re just scratching the surface. So, applying that logic to the customers and their data centers, they don’t have all the predictions and all the forecasts of what is going to be required from that environment. That means that having the ability to make changes to densities, designs, layouts, cooling systems, and more is all going to be required. We’re on the cusp of a groundbreaking innovation, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. There’s no established playbook for this. There are all sorts of decisions that customers are being forced to make today, not knowing if in five to ten years, those designs will be able to support the applications their companies are going to be asking them to develop. So, an adaptive and flexible design that can evolve and change with the customers as their needs change is one of the things we work extremely hard to build into our platform. It’s inherent in our intellectual property. It’s inherent in how we engineer our supply chain to make sure that customers can modularly change things over time within the four walls of their data center building.
I also think about how hardware refreshes were done in the past. For example, you would build a new data center, deploy new hardware, do a controlled cut over from the old data center to the new data center, and then decommission the old data center. That’s not going to be an option now; you won’t be able to have a replica data center to do a controlled hardware refresh. You’re going to have to figure out how to take the data centers you have and evolve them to meet the changing needs of your technical requirements or, ultimately, your customers’ requirements. That’s why it’s really critical to start building that adaptability into designs that you’re bringing to market. Aligned is, in my opinion, the leader of doing that. With the combination of our Delta Cube and our DeltaFlow~ air and liquid cooling technologies, we’re able to create a very adaptable environment. These air and water-cooled units are very interchangeable, which means that if a customer goes 100 percent air day one and wants to evolve that same environment to 30 percent water or 50 percent water, they can do that in the data hall that is already operational. So, we’re going to continue to look for ways to innovate to make sure customers can evolve and future-proof their designs to plan for the unknowns.
Sustainability is a core value for Aligned, and the recent Three Green Globes certifications for PHX-04 and ORD-02 further solidify your work in this critical space. How do you go about partnering with clients who share your commitment to a greener future, and what factors should stakeholders consider when it comes to pairing sustainability with high performance? Is sustainability being sacrificed in the race for faster time-to-market?
We often get asked about whether sustainability is on the back burner in exchange for speed-to-market. The simple answer is, no, sustainability is still a major priority for both Aligned and our customers. While the need to source non-traditional power and find better ways of storing the power itself will accelerate sustainability goals and achievements, innovation is born from the sheer scarcity of power. I certainly don’t believe that high performance means less sustainability. In fact, I feel it’s quite the opposite. High performance requires more efficiencies, and by definition, efficiency is getting more with less.
Now, we do see customers going to non-traditional data center markets. In those instances, they’ll be bringing their requirements for sustainability to new corners of the world. And again, I think that drives even more initiatives to operate more sustainably as we continue to scale.
Looking at sales and channel go-to-market strategies as well as partnerships and new revenue opportunities, how has the customer profile evolved over time, and what’s in the pipeline for Aligned?
While a lot of sales strategy is focused on hyperscale, large enterprise, and federal customers—and that profile has remained relatively consistent—it’s the size and scale of those deals that is growing, especially thanks to high-performance computing and AI workloads. Customers facing such exponential growth are also becoming more sophisticated buyers than ever. They understand the conditions of the market and Aligned’s ecosystem of data center brokers, agents, and systems integrators. We really embrace that ecosystem—our channel—to work hand-in-hand with our customers and ensure we’re able to support their long-term needs.
Another evolution I’ve noticed is that it used to be very clear that customers understood exactly what they needed and wanted. Now a customer will enter a contract for a traditional data center design that may not deliver until two, three years out. Due to the scarcity of power and how those designs evolve over time, you’re really entering a contract and then reengineering it to meet the customer’s needs. So, again, flexibility and continuing to work with customers to meet their needs is critical.
