 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here your host, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back at Knowledge 16, everybody. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. theCUBE does many, many events throughout the year and this is one of our favorites. Dave Genshel is here. He is the group executive of customer and technology at Next DC. Welcome to theCUBE, Dave. Thanks for having me. So, how are things in Australia? Great, we're not in the summer, but our weather is okay. Things are going well. Yeah, we're really enjoying our business and our growth. So tell us about your business, your organization, help us frame what it's all about. Well, Next DC is a six-year-old company. We like to still think we're a startup but we've grown significantly over those six years. We're the largest independent data center operator. We design and build and then operate data centers. So think of us as almost a shopping mall for computers. We have a tagline, we are where the cloud lives. So as an independent data center operator, we are independent from a telco. So we're neutral when it comes to connectivity but we're also a go-to or meeting point for connectivity as we know connectivity is a very critical part of the data center offering as well. So we're six years old. We've had hyper growth over the last five years since we went operational. We're around 45 to 50 megawatts today and in fact yesterday we just announced that we were building two more facilities, our second site in Melbourne and our second site in Brisbane. So things are going well. We continue to grow. Probably one key thing about our business that's a little different is we're very partner centric. So we sell our data center as a service through our partner network. We have around 250 partners that take our product, data center as a service and sell that to their customers and we sell anything from a quarter rack to an entire hall. So the type of product or service the customer can buy can be very small or very large scale. So you're not selling compute and storage and infrastructure or myths and gigabytes. You're selling the infrastructure around it. We like to think of us enabling customers to sell that value. So as everybody's moving to the cloud or moving to everything as a service, we're an enabling component to that value proposition. We're not the only piece. So we provide obviously the power and the infrastructure and the physical building and obviously all those associated services, security, telemetry and so on. But that's where our value really is. We don't then go out and sell an end service, storage as a service, software as a service. We want to enable those services and those providers. Your customers do that. They essentially bring their own servers. They bring their gear to our facilities and we help optimize that facility for them. Okay, and they manage that however they want to manage it. So when they come to our facility, it's like coming to their own data center. It's a true shared facility and everything they would have back at their own data center, they would have it our center as well with the key difference that we're doing it at scale. So we're building tier three certified data centers. So some customers may not be able to have a tier three certified facility. They can come to us as a true shared service. So is that a primary use case or value proposition? Talk about that a little bit more. Why do they come to you? Why do they buy? There's a couple of reasons why different customers come to us. The first is that the capital outlay to build a true tier three facility is gonna be limiting for most organizations. If we go back in history, you think about big data centers that were built for banks, airlines and large customers. Today you can be a very small enterprise and take the same advantage or have the same advantage of the same type of facility as a large customer have had many years ago and you can just take one quarter rack or one rack and really the product is exactly the same. It's a little bit of a similar value proposition when we think SaaS. I can build an application from scratch or I can be a small business and be up and running with my SaaS application. I don't have to buy all that infrastructure. Similar theory there. So how's it evolved from back in the day? I just think in Colo, in the late 90s, that was kind of an option. Go to a Colo center, go to a Colo center and put your X. How's the business evolved since then? Obviously we've come a long, long way since those early days of just throwing my box in the cloud that's happened to be sitting down by the train tracks on the fiber. I think what's happened is organizations have realized that whilst we are a Colo facility and that really is the core business, organizations have realized that they can be a lot more productive with their time and money and the cost to get into a facility has come down significantly. Probably more importantly, connectivity has enabled the ability to be as spread out and as geographically spread out as you want to be both within Australia or on a global basis. The other thing that's happened is if I'm accessing a lot of different services, I want to be as close to those services as possible. And then if I'm a provider, I want to be as close to my customers. So if I'm a SaaS provider and I'm in next DC, I can get closer and closer to those enterprises that may want direct connect or faster connectivity into those services as well, be it infrastructure as a service, software as a service, or maybe some very verticalized applications. You know, do you typically cater to smaller companies or is it a bell curve that's all over? So we like to look at the market and say we're unique because we cater to everybody. Often we don't have knowledge of exactly who the end user customer is, but we're focusing on our partners that are selling to those customers. We have some of the largest customers in the world. We have some of the largest Australian companies and we have many smaller partners and mid-sized partners that get the same type of service, albeit at scale. And then do you, it begs the question, a lot of talk about direct connect and getting my data center next to my cloud provider's data center for quick connections and direct connections and not a bunch of internet hops. So are you guys doing that with your data centers positioning them close to and having those direct connection relationships with some of the larger clouds? Sure, I mean, today we're a global, the world is global. You can be close in proximity, but also understanding what the growth looks like for those platforms is important. So we've made some big decisions and we've made some big bets and we have great relationships with a lot of cloud providers. The location is important, but probably what's more important is the connectivity story into those, so we call them the virtual connects into those cloud platforms. That's a product or a service that we sell as well. So we partner with some of the largest ones and we offer that service directly to the partner community as well as to the end users. So when you enter one of these two or three data centers, it's like going into the Pentagon. I mean, it's not, you can't just walk right in, stroll and I presume that's the case with your facilities, maybe describe what that experience is like. So the experience is everything. I mean, it's a great question because often at times the experience of going to a data center is a little bit like going to a prison. So it looks and feels like a prison, a very secured facility, hand over your license or identification and it's very serious. We talk about the customer experience and making that better. We actually wanna make coming to the data center like coming to a day spa, more than coming to a prison. And it's funny in a way because we can make that experience better, we can differentiate ourselves and drive greater business. We don't believe fundamentally that building a tier three data center is high in capital expenditure but anyone can do that if they throw the money on the table. But can anybody deliver a great experience? So security and access is where it all starts. Whether it's getting online to tell you I'm coming or doing the induction to be certified to come in, all of those touch points, the more I know about you, the more I can make that experience seamless and intuitive and so on, we can make the experience of coming in brilliant and in fact, even going out. So to give you an example, when you come into the facility, there's a number of checks to get in, we're weighing you in, we're weighing you out just ensuring that there is zero risk because after all, we are a shared facility. So we take security very seriously, access all the way down to the rack is a value proposition or product we offer as well. So we're unique as well because we offer electronic rack locking and rack opening. So down to your individual rack, in fact, down to a quarter rack. So think pizza box for entry points in one rack that's unique to your access that we may have provisioned to you. So very fine grain granularity of access. And it's a big process to sort that out now. So is that where you use service now? It's one area that we early on looked at. Access is something that's critical to our operation, but it's also critical to ensuring that you feel comfortable in the brand. So when we looked at the first deployment of our service now, instance or environment, we looked at access and we started to figure out, how can we automate that process and take the humans out of the five or six steps because really it costs a lot more having humans do those steps, but it also creates potentially a lot more error. So we built a nice process. We understood what was needed. Again, the things I talked about, knowing more about you earlier on, provisioning you with what you need when you need it, remembering we're a 24 by seven, 365 days a year facility. It's manned every minute of the day all year round. So if you come in at 3 a.m. on New Year's Eve, if that's what you want to do, we have to be able to give you or provision you the same access. So a service management framework enables that capability very easily for us. So I'm building a checklist of things that CIOs need to have on their checklist or items on their checklist when they communicate to the board about security. That's far. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now. I've not heard anything about physical security. So Dave, what should be on your CIOs checklist for communicating to the board about security? So, I mean, security is such a broad topic. So when we think about physical security on the perimeter side, we are a world-class to get the tier three certification. They're table stakes. You have to have certain things. The size of the fence that's around the perimeter of the building, the type of cameras that you're using, how long are we recording that data for? When can we access that data? Then of course, all of the general PCI-style certification that's needed for security are also very important. The thing that's sort of changed a little for us is we have so much data as well. We have customer data. We have data that's our own data. Ensuring that we have the right security posture in place is also something that we see as really, really important. How does the responsibility fall between you and your customer and your customer's customer in the securing of maybe the end of the year? Of maybe the end customer's credit card data or something? Because there's kind of a couple stewards of that within that chain. Yeah, it's a great question. Our value, if you wish, really is around giving you a service level on the power and the facility. And really, if we can deliver those two things, we don't really know what you're putting physically and again, the information in the rack and on the infrastructure that's sitting in the rack. We can't control that because that's potentially your IP and your business. So really where we have to focus on is the thing that we can enable you is all the things we talked about, getting in the building, having the great facility and the great experience, but the power and the infrastructure. So we make sure that our facilities are built in a way that we can guarantee those service levels. We have 100% service level for power and the facility and ensuring that if we can get to that point, what you do at that point is pretty much in your hands. We can't control it and we couldn't give you a service level on your infrastructure, on your data, because we don't actually manage it. Right, in the rack. And your service now journey started with facilities, is that right? The service now journey really started. One of the nice things about being a startup is we don't have a lot of legacy. We have some basic legacy ticketing system. We have obviously Microsoft Excel and email, which is a legacy system. And so we started the journey by saying, we need to stop the emails, we need to stop the Excel spreadsheets, and we need to get our old home-grown ticketing system off. And the journey started with just getting IT bed down. So we wanted to get our IT processes, our service desk, really, really well refined and expose any opportunity for anything as a service on the internal side through service now. So we've done some cool things with our legal department. If somebody wants to get a legal contract configured, they have to do that through service now. In fact, one of our lawyers has come to us and said, I really understand this, and I can measure the workflow between when you made the request to when the contract went out. We never had a way to say, well, that took four days or two hours, and actually give that back to the user. So we've done a lot of cool things when it comes to different internal use cases, including IT, of course. The journey has been really positive. At times, we need to control the user requests about I have another idea that I want to push through service now, but really where we're gonna expose an enormous new value is when we turn that on, and that's in our program right now to our customers, because we wanted to get it all fine-tuned and we wanted to understand the program, the platform internally, and then really get good at managing our service desk and our service management or anything as a service philosophy, and then give it to our customers. Great, all right, Dave, we're out of time. We have to leave it there, but I'll give you the last word on Knowledge 16, what's the experience been like as you're heading back to Australia? What's the bumper sticker on the show? This is a great show. I mean, the types of people that you meet, everybody from compliance people, technology people, executives, it's a really good mix of people, great value, and for us, just it's a way for us to get our head around the way that service and customer experience is going to help us differentiate our business. All right, Dave Gentul, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and good luck with the scale and the growth of your business. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody will be back with our next guest. We're live, day three from Knowledge 16, this is theCUBE. We have hundreds and maybe thousands of non-mission critical.