This is an episode of HawkTalk, datacenterHawk’s series of candid one on one conversations with executives and leaders in the data center industry. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check them all out on our blog. If you’d like to know when we release future episodes, you can subscribe here.

We recently hosted Russell Cozart, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy at Cyxtera as part of our HawkTalk series. Russell started in the data center industry 15 years ago with Terramark and has spent time at Dell, VMWare, and prior to joining Cyxtera, managed GE’s cloud hosting portfolio.

We covered topics like what it looked like to launch Cyxtera three years ago, the trends that are informing their go to market strategy now, and his read on the challenges enterprise IT leaders are having today.

You can check out the full interview in the video above, or if you’re short on time, skim some of our top takeaways below.

Focus On Focus

After acquiring Century Link’s data center assets, the Cyxtera team focused on how they could make and deliver data center products and services better - and faster. Russell summarized it as the team asking themselves: how do we deliver the core value that we want to deliver with the combination of innovation, stability, and resiliency that customers had come to know with the Century Link data center asset?

Part of that required a renewed focus. For example, the data center team spun their cyber security offerings off into separate companies so that they could focus more on delivering a world class experience to their enterprise customers.

Delivering World Class Experiences

That world class experience is driven by understanding the trends, challenges, and needs of their current and future customers.

For example, during “cloud first” and now “cloud smart” movement, people have become very used to the point - click - provision level of instant access to resources. Data center operators like Cyxtera are evaluating how they might align their products and services as that paradigm develops.

COVID-19 Has Accelerated, Not Changed, IT Mandates

Particularly with COVID-19, the mandates placed upon CIOs and IT teams have remained the same - just accelerated. Everyone is asking how they can get to Point B faster.

These leaders are looking for partners that can help them as they start to charge faster down the path of digital transformation. That trend of transformation is likely to hockey stick, especially around people using a hybrid combination of public cloud and colocation.

IT Challenges Remain The Same

While IT mandates remain the same, so do the challenges of the enterprise data center user.

CapEx budgets are shrinking, many are supporting aging legacy infrastructure, and the drive to a hybrid IT strategy has left many with skills gaps and complex solutions. These have historically been challenges in the enterprise IT space, but now with COVID-19 the pressure is heightened.

At the same time, leaders are trying to get what they need without sacrificing core tenants of delivering on their own IT strategy, like staying flexible and agile while being fast to market. This flexible and agile environment is top of mind for a provider like Cyxtera as they think about bringing products to market.

How To Build Products That Resonate With Customers

Maintaining a solid roadmap that leads to successful products across the globe takes work.

Cyxtera has a presence across 29 markets globally and has invested heavily in developing an intimate understanding of their customers and their challenges. This enables them to then map out an architecture that will assist their customers in their journeys and ultimately ingest it into Cyxtera’s roadmap to ensure they bring valuable products to market.

Looking Forward

Looking forward, “the next 3-5 years are going to be game changing for the industry”, Russell says. Data center providers are on the precipice of major changes, driven primarily by the changes we’re seeing in the enterprise.

“[At Cyxtera, we’re] excited to deliver the cutting edge and make sure that’s something that resonates with customers. Their lives are changing and that’s for us and the industry as a whole to make sure we’re there.”

Don’t forget to check out the rest of our HawkTalk's and don’t miss out on our latest release of market data for the data center industry.