AI-ready or not: Navigating the future of enterprise with Digital Realty and ePlus

Enterprise environments have grown extremely complex, with some workloads in various clouds, others on-premises, and still others in offsite data centers. However, all of it needs to work together seamlessly to support advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). In this Q&A, Jared Stanley and Justin Mescher share how IT can bring order to the chaos.

Justin Mescher
Vice President of AI, Cloud, and Data Center Solutions at ePlus

Mescher started his career in corporate IT, managing a hospital’s data center. He then worked as a presales engineer at EMC and CTO for IDS, where he developed the cloud practice. Since ePlus’ acquisition of IDS in 2017, Mescher has led and grown the data center, cloud, and AI practices, meeting with strategic customers and developing new solutions to align with customer needs.

Jared Stanley
Senior Solutions Architect, Digital Realty

Stanley is part of the CTO organization and responsible for leading strategy, enablement of partnerships, and solution design for PlatformDIGITAL®. Stanley started his career at UUNET and has held leadership positions with service providers over the years. Most recently he was the Global Vice President of Digital Transformation at a consulting firm acquired by Accenture. Today, he supports sales, engineering, and Digital Realty customers in all facets of their IT transformation and journey.

Tell us a little bit about Digital Realty. How do you help customers with their IT and digital transformation journeys?

Jared Stanley: Over the last two decades, we’ve created the world’s largest globally interconnected data center platform, PlatformDIGITAL®. As a result, we can deliver space, power, and interconnection at scale through 300+ data centers across more than 25 countries in more than 50 metros on six continents.

And how does ePlus help customers with their IT and digital transformation journeys?

Justin Mescher: We’re a 33-year-old publicly traded company with deep expertise in data center infrastructure, cloud, networking, collaboration, security, and AI. We help enterprises find the right technologies and get the most out of their investments in their modernization journey.

Collectively, you have 8,000+ customers. What are the current key struggles and challenges for IT leaders?

Jared Stanley: IT leaders are struggling to manage and leverage the large amounts of data their organizations create. Simultaneously, they must protect their organization against the wide array of ever evolving security threats while creating an agile infrastructure that can incorporate new technologies, such as AI and adapt rapidly to changing needs.

Justin Mescher: The two biggest challenges are explosive data growth and unpredictable capacity planning in the data center and cloud. Needs are highly variable right now, and it’s extremely difficult to forecast costs and resource requirements.

How does the Digital Realty/ ePlus partnership help resolve these challenges?

Jared Stanley: Digital Realty provides flexibility to deploy a single rack, cages, or build-to-suits of up to 50+ megawatts. We also provide access to a multitude of carriers, on-ramps, and interconnection technologies to deploy infrastructure in various densities at scale. As a result, Digital Realty (through PlatformDIGITAL®, our data center platform) and ePlus enable our customers to unite many different providers, partners, and technologies into a repeatable IT delivery model.

Justin Mescher: Right. Customers don’t get boxed in. We help them deploy a hybrid cloud solution that enables interconnectivity using their traditional data centers and the public cloud.

For instance, let’s say a traditional enterprise customer is about to go through a large infrastructure refresh and is unclear on what their capacity needs will be over the next 3–5 years due to ongoing cloud migrations and incoming data to support AI initiatives. We can deliver a storage-as-a-service offering in a Digital Realty data center where capacity is available on demand at scale. Plus, it’s cloud-connected, so when they have hybrid workloads, we can build all the secure networking to deliver a great hybrid cloud experience.

What is your perspective on AI, and how has it changed your companies and customers?

Jared Stanley: It’s the most disruptive emerging technology of my lifetime and a must-have to gain competitive advantage. Our data centers are ideal for supporting AI deployments at scale, and our modular architecture can be rapidly retrofitted for the enormous power and interconnection demands that AI infrastructure will consume.

Justin Mescher: We’ve developed a framework for the three stages of AI maturity: AI-curious, AI-ready, and AI-mature. While more than 90% are in the AI-curious phase with great ideas, they lack strategy and alignment between the business and IT. We have workshops designed to help organizations find use cases that will deliver the right outcomes and return on investment for the business.

As you mentioned earlier, organizations are creating an enormous amount of data. How are you helping your customers resolve data gravity and latency?

Jared Stanley: Digital Realty published recent findings in our Data Gravity Index™ (DGx 2.0), derived from 1 billion calculations across 500 metros. By 2025, global enterprise data creation will reach 1.2 million exabytes, with 93% of this data created outside the public cloud. Our global, massively interconnected data center footprint has powerful tools for mitigating data gravity.

Justin Mescher: As data grows, it pulls additional use cases toward it, and without proactive management, it can get out of hand. Digital Realty gives us the ability to create an interconnected, hybrid environment for our customers with low latency and strong security to support that data growth. It’s like a multilane data highway that makes it much easier to access data no matter where it resides.

In your opinion, what should IT leaders focus on in the next 12–24 months?

Jared Stanley: AI must be a top priority to ensure you don’t fall behind. But don’t undertake this journey alone. Find trusted partners that have visibility into the supply chain, capacity, and technology solutions, along with plenty of strong customer references.

Finally, as data growth pushes workloads and applications to the edge, protecting that data and maintaining it in a reliable environment become paramount.

Justin Mescher: AI readiness and preparedness are critical. Very few IT leaders will transform their business in a year with AI, but once IT and the business find good use cases, they need to be able to deploy and scale quickly. To do that, they’ll need to have clean data, a governance program, and an AI-ready infrastructure in place.

To learn more about the Digital Realty/ ePlus partnership as well as how to make your enterprise AI and data ready, contact us today.