Brian Miller:

Bridgepointe is a technology strategy firm.

What we do is help business customers procure, implement, and manage technology services. We have a six-step process that we’ve built. And the big thing is discovery on the front end. We’ve done a really effective job bringing on talented sales engineers and sales leadership that ask a slew of open-ended questions to get a real deep understanding of where customers are today, and where they want to go in the future.

And then from that, we down-select many of our suppliers to figure out who is the right player, at the right price, and most importantly, the right technology. Digital Reality checks a lot of boxes for us and our customers. Financial stability and the ability to grow with our customers’ demands, both nationally and globally is paramount right now.

Customers aren’t only looking for what they need today, but what they need in the future. Most importantly: it comes down to trust and relationships. And Digital Reality: one of their huge differentiators is the people taking their business seriously. They don’t take themselves seriously. And right now, the data center landscape is as hot as hot can be.

And it really comes down to ease of doing business. And it’s not just negotiating MSAs and service orders. It’s on the personal level and being able to interact with people professionally. And at the same time solving customers’ problems. Years ago, it was all about who’s on net. So what service providers are natively built into the data center. That’s something that provides customers with options.

And that’s evolved dramatically: from what hyperscalers are on net, what potential partners that you can cross connect, or interconnect to. And that’s something that Digital Reality takes very seriously. We want to make sure our customers aren’t on an island. And they can grow within the data center or also grow to another facility where it’s a very predictable experience.

I think Digital Reality is very forward-thinking in making sure it’s not just solving the customer’s problems today, but it’s truly future-proofing their needs. Right now, we are getting an onslaught of opportunities with AI companies. It’s paramount for us to understand what capacity is available right now, globally, as well as what’s coming online.

A lot of people out there are building one, two data centers, and those are capital-intensive, as Digital Reality knows. And if you don’t have the available capital in the future, you may put a customer in a data center and they won’t have the ability to grow. We’re seeing a lot of customers that had on-prem data centers, and we’re seeing companies shrink dramatically the space that they have, as well as just move out entirely.

And so they have to put that equipment and that physical infrastructure somewhere. We’re also finally seeing customers that are moving some workloads: out of the hyperscalers and putting them into a data center, not necessarily all of them. Those interactions with customers… Several years ago, we were trying to educate them on the opportunities for them to diversify and move certain things from more of a certain static state environment into a data center, and now they’re coming to us.

Suddenly, the technical conversations are in the boardroom. I think it’s important to know that we try and take a tops-down approach. What are the business drivers? And it doesn’t necessarily have to be technology driven, but in many instances, technology can help solve those potential business initiatives.

One of the things that we really like is they roll up their shirt sleeves. The employees that we deal with on a day-to-day basis are all about solving customer problems. The culture at Digital Reality is very: the answer is yes, the question’s how, and that’s great. From a sales standpoint, that’s what you want.

You just want a level playing field and the opportunity to help customers close business and make money.

Gartner® Report - Executive Essentials: Modernization of Infrastructure and Operations and Cloud