What do you hope to achieve from attending this year’s Metro Connect?
Metro Connect is a key event for Colo Atl, primarily for the meaningful networking opportunities with fellow c-level executives that it provides. The ability to have such high-quality, face-to-face meetings with the CEOs, CFO’s and COOs of some of the world’s top carriers and network operators is essential to Colo Atl’s growth strategy for 2015 and beyond.
What are your major priorities in the metro market in 2015?
It is our intent to continue to raise more awareness of our niche offerings, which also include Georgia Technology Center (GTC) and the Southeast Network Access Point (SNAP), located within the Colo Atl facility. GTC is a live laboratory for network equipment vendors to highlight optical and electrical hardware and operating systems, while SNAP provides next-generation Internet Exchange (IX) solutions, including SDN peering, testing, collaboration and implementation.
What trends do you expect to see in the metro market in 2015?
Metro Connect is one of Colo Atl’s key industry events to attend due to the networking and engaging speaking panels and roundtable discussions that take place among company owners and executives. Being privy to such discussions allows me to both learn and be a part of new trends for 2015.
Observing from my end, an obvious hot trend in the metro market for 2015 would definitely be the continued success of integrating software-defined networking (SDN) solutions as a practical way to virtualise the data centre and more easily enable customers to deploy secure, isolated cloud networks. The need for virtualisation and flexibility is a must for digital businesses of today.