 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals I'm Laura Noland coming to you from virtual PTC 21 Joining me today is Mark T. Lee CEO and founder of Edgevana Mark. Welcome to JSA TV. Oh, thank you very much for having me It's pleasure to be here Before our viewers who aren't familiar with Edgevana. Could you give us an elevator pitch? Sure Edgevana was really created to try to solve for what CIOs that I worked with in the past including my own experience and had spoken to recently were complaining about and that's basically that digital transformation and Efforts to pursue edge computing were Complicating their efforts to distribute IT gear and solutions to places in in disparate locations around the world and they needed somebody that could help smooth that process and And reduce the time to value and so Edgevana has really put out there to help customers compose global infrastructure solutions that include things like data center whitespace to manage services to Edge to global network services, etc To compose those services and help you acquire them as quickly and as easily as possible and then manage them after the fact as Easily as possible almost anywhere in the world Well, let's go back just a little bit and I do have some interesting stats for you Which are really remarkable. So you started Edgevana back in 2019 and then soft launch the platform in August You already have 36 operators and more than 3,300 data centers across 107 global locations within your ecosystem So what's been the key to the successful launch and then what's next? Yeah, I'm pretty lucky in the sense that I I Managed to get pretty good attention and engagement Through forms of communication and social media engagement like LinkedIn and Twitter, etc And so our launch was was made successful really by the help of friends who are interested in what we're doing And my co-founder myself our own following in both areas LinkedIn and Twitter And that really drove significant engagement the kind of engagement that most PR firms would have charged $50,000 for probably And so that was a real benefit for us and then as far as bringing on Our supply our customers on the sell side of the marketplace data centers and etc, etc is I've spent a good part of my career in the data center space in the edge space in the cloud space So many of the data center folks around the world are people that I've worked with or known at some level Spoken to at events or participated with at events or or done business with throughout my career so my ability to engage with them and get them on board and get them thinking about the idea of of a much more Consolidated view of of their offerings for the customer Making it easier for the customer to consume their product effectively making their product more viable in a marketplace where the customer is looking For global solutions and single-vendor solutions I Really had no trouble convincing them that that edge Vana was worth taking a chance on Mark your website talks about a vision for sustainability Can you talk about why your team feels so strongly about this topic? Yeah, it's it's it's probably not what I would lead first with at a in front of VCs but Efficiency has been part of my work history from almost from the beginning Even from my time at HP, but especially once I started building data centers in the very early 2000s even founded an organization called data center pulse with my brother-in-law and Coordinated with groups like the green grid and 7 by 24 and others to help push for more sustainable more efficient solutions in the data center space So it was only natural that when I finally founded my own company that I would continue to pursue that but really the kind of the underlying opportunity of what makes the future of edge Vana Potentially exciting is that what we're really trying to do is make better use of infrastructure that it already exists around the world There are tens of thousands of data centers when you include a Colocation facilities and central offices, etc. There are tens of thousands of locations that provide opportunity for deployment of infrastructure That already exists, but they're difficult to get to so a big part of our strategy is that is based on the idea that as Christian Bellotti once said the best data center ever built is the one you don't have to build Absolutely. Well mark. I have a I've been dying to ask you this question. I understand that you have a law named after you It's called tealy's law and it states quote in technology new services enabled quickly becoming services required All right, you got to give us the loadout on that. What is how did that even happen? So it it happened something of a joke, right? I mean realistically I wrote it as a joke So if it's hard to claim a law when you wrote it yourself, it's like saying I quoted myself, right? But the the basic idea came from a discussion I was having with with others in the industry And specifically about edge With the idea being that you had to be really careful about what you enabled for customers Even if you were enabling it thinking you were doing somebody a favor So just as a simple example Let's say I was the it person that supported you in a remote office somewhere And you called me someday and you said mark I really need the network to work out on the patio because i'm doing this thing and and they're working inside and And the patio would help facilitate me being able to do my job and i'm like well, that's not supported But okay fine. I like laura all enable the network out on the patio for her It just so happens next week Laura and Mary and A dozen other people have now determined that working on the patio is what they prefer And that network has become a requirement Well, it doesn't sound so bad Until you realize that that's a very simple Thing enabling network into a new space But what if it was a complex application or complex service or what if Instead of just laura being one person in one office and that's the only place where that would ever happen I had a thousand offices or even a hundred offices where now Everybody expected that same level of service. Nobody paid for it. Nobody went through justification for it And now it's become a requirement and I have to support it And so the the point of tealy's law is that you really have to be careful That if you enable a service for someone Inside a store making it more convenient to work with customers Or making it more convenient for customers to work with you in a store and you do it as a favor You do it as just a a thing you can do because it was easy You're going to find that a month later. It's going to be a minimum requirement for opening the store to have that function work So that's really the point of the joke originally Well, I love the joke and I love the story. So thanks for sharing. I appreciate that mark So mark, I'd like to pick your brain just a little bit I know that you have an extensive track record in the tech and telecom industries 30 plus years At brands such as such as hp vmware and ericsson. So you witnessed quite a bit About tech trends. So what do you think has been the most impactful for the data center space? Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to argue that the most impactful trend over the last 15 years has really been the focus on scale by the global players companies like microsoft and amazon and google and others right the the the forcing function of needing the kind of scale that they have on making data centers more efficient not just from Sustainability standpoint, but more efficient to operate which By virtue oftentimes applies to your sustainability benefit at the same time but many of those practices From from how much and what kind of air conditioning can be used to I mean When I was first building data centers in in 2004 2005 Using outside air as an example Was was like, oh sure. Let's just go to mars next week, right? Nobody wanted to do that and now Those kinds of benefits pushed by the scale and demand of cloud have permeated much more of the industry driven down cost of operations if you did ask me in 2008 ish time frame what the cost of a four. I mean a tier four One megawatt data center would be I would say it was going to be somewhere between 15 and 20 million dollars That same capability that same capacity now might be six or seven million dollars so it's um It's hard to argue with that kind of impact when you see how much scale Data centers are taking up around the world whether or not you include the hyperscale data centers the data center market as a whole Continues to grow at somewhere between 12 and 15 compounded annually. So it's just it's a massive market and it drives an incredible amount of Of money in the industry and so that efficiency is is important not only in being able to continue to scale But it's efficient in frankly and being able to continue to offer services that don't cost any more than they do already Well said well before we wrap up mark where can our viewers go to learn more about Edge vana and learn all about the great things that are happening there. Oh, well, thank you for asking Edge vana is pretty easy. It's just edge vana.com um We have a podcast there. We have some blogs there certainly the website has Pretty good information on how to sign up if you're a seller how to use us if you're a buyer And if you're interested in anything else that I'm writing or doing Please look me up on twitter on mt. Lee 10 And I'm also really active on linkedin where I'm constantly asking Questions to test my assumptions about what is right and what is wrong in the technology space All right, you heard it from mark go connect with him and thank you mark for joining us today It was so great talking with you. Oh, thank you very much for I really appreciate it And thank you viewers for tuning in to jsa tv and jsa podcast happy networking