Mark Thiele has spent his entire life in and around IT infrastructure, even building his own fair share of data centers. But if there is one thing about the entire process that he finds vexing, it’s the wasted time between when companies start negotiating contracts for data centers to when it actually launches.. So after a 27-year career working with other companies, he set out on his own and started Edgevana with a simple goal: to help companies get to the edge faster.

“Getting to the edge may seem hard for some, but it's not for lack of capability,” he said. The problem for most is not that stuff isn't available, but how do I find it? And how do I make quick determinations about what combination of services or capabilities or partners do I need in order to solve the problem or create the opportunity that I'm pursuing for my business?”

Mark joined IT Visionaries to discuss why streamlining the buying and implementation process is the key to moving quickly to the edge. Plus, Mark touches on why edge computing continues to be on the rise and what IT leaders should be looking for in edge technology.

Main Takeaways

• What To Solve For: At the end of the day, the main goal of edge computing is to solve two things: t latency, and how data is going to be used.
• Hit the Easy Button: The negotiation process and implementation of new data centers in the past has been a grueling and time-consuming process. Edgevana is simplifying that process by allowing companies to quickly negotiate contracts and string together equipment at various locations in partnership with other Edgevana users. By doing this, Edgevanaa is giving more users access to the market at a quicker pace.
• Data Centers Still Exist?: Even with cloud infrastructure, data centers will continue to thrive well into the future because they serve two main purposes: first, companies continue to use them as a more reliable source for some of their aging technologies. Second, even if most companies were to convert their old technology stacks over to the cloud, most of those technologies would still be running from the physical data centers, so enterprises would then be paying to store this data in two different spaces.

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