David Liggitt, founder of datacenterHawk, recently met with Andy Stewart, CEO of Evoque Data Centers, and Peter Roosakos, CTO of Foghorn Consulting. The news on everyone’s mind: Evoque’s acquisition of Foghorn.
About the Guests, and What Prompted the Acquisition
Andy was the CFO and then CSO at TierPoint through over $2 billion worth of acquisitions and funding. He took over as CEO at Evoque about a year ago, which meant that he had to primarily learn the corporate culture and team compositions remotely. Once he established pandemic protocols and got a good look at the internal workings of Evoque, he brought in key executives and revamped the sales model of the company. Each move reflected the industry changes that had been happening since the pandemic started and built towards the overall plan for a post-pandemic future.
Peter started in the mid 90's as the cofounder and CTO of Computerlandscapes Inc. Exodus eventually acquired the consulting company to build out their professional services division. Fast forward eight years, and the cloud was in its infancy. Peter's team at Opelin used these new scaling infrastructure capabilities to serve the needs of smaller companies. HP acquired them in 2007, and he stayed on for a couple of years during the transition period. After he left HP, he started Foghorn with the mission of leveraging the public cloud to move companies forward.
In the front end of the interview, Andy shared what he's most excited about with the acquisition of Foghorn. The Mountain View-based digital transformation company recently agreed to a union of their offerings. He said that the acquisition will change how Evoque goes to market and drastically expand what they can offer to customers. His enterprise clients want better cost management and visibility into their infrastructure usage. Their feedback made it clear: Digital transformation and application-first approaches were the future of his company.
Cloud Computing is the Future... Sometimes
David asked Peter how he talks a client through the planning phase and how long a data center and cloud relationship can last.
Peter noted that, historically, all-in strategies seemed like the most cost effective and straightforward way to go: Either all on-premises, all in colocation, or all on cloud. But digital transformation has put a stress on pure performance over simplicity. So almost everything these days is a hybrid solution, as the apps take center stage. Optimizing workloads to run on the most performant platforms yields far better long term results.
Andy added how this acquisition helps clients plan beyond pure colocation space and power strategies. He mentions that it's hard to stand out from the crowd as a specialist, particularly when cloud computing is such a huge part of the landscape. The flexibility needs to be there. Infrastructure agnostic approaches are far more impressive and can cover clients' holistic needs. It allows a hosting strategy that evolves over time; nothing is static, and nothing is overly painful to adjust to if a new efficiency takes precedence for a client. Andy also shared that an important strategy they’ve adopted includes providing colocation space to niche service vendors that can meet client needs and introducing them to enterprise clients as service partners.
