Digital Realty unveils new data center platform at MarketplaceLIVE in NYC

The company is hoping to make headway in Europe with its newest data center and colocation tools.

Data center giant Digital Realty debuted its latest offering, PlatformDIGITAL, during the MarketplaceLIVE conference in New York City on Nov. 7.

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PlatformDIGITAL is a data center platform Digital Realty believes will help it penetrate the European market as well as others outside of the U.S.

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But throughout the conference, the company reiterated that this new platform and other new tools were a pivot toward helping enterprises create the kind of infrastructure that is specific to them.

“Gartner predicts that by 2022, 60% of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, rather than traditional data centers. As a result, there is a growing industry imperative to create new centers of data that reside between the core and the edge,” said Digital Realty CEO William Stein.

“With the announcement of PlatformDIGITAL, we uniquely enable customers to deploy their IT infrastructure at the centers of data exchange around the world, bringing users, things, applications, clouds and networks to the data,” Stein said. “Our customers get the advantage of access to fit-for-purpose infrastructure that can power their digital transformations at the scale and speed they require today and into the future.”

Over the last decade, Digital Realty says it has grown to become one of the world’s biggest companies investing solely in carrier-neutral data centers that provide colocation and peering services, with 214 operating data center facilities across the world.

The company owns huge locations in New York, Chicago and London and recently clinched an $8.4 billion deal to buy the European data center operator Interxion. The latest unveiling is another salvo in its battle against rival, Equinix, which recently announced its own investment in Europe.

Digital Realty said the new tool gives customers a platform that will help solve global coverage, capacity, and ecosystem connectivity needs with a single data center provider while tailoring infrastructure deployments and controls to match a specific need.

Corey Dyer, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Digital Realty, said in an interview that PlatformDIGITAL and the other new tools unveiled meshed with many of the conference’s themes, which explored the future of IT and ever-evolving data needs or concerns.

“If you think through PlatformDIGITAL, what do you have to have for it? You want to be connected, you want to be always on, you want to have coverage, and you want capacity,” Dyer said.

“We use this to learn from each other and also hopefully get some messages out. We think we’re providing a bit of thought leadership to the industry about the pervasive architectures that we think make sense if you’re going to handle the changing, evolving needs of data in the world right now,” he said.

“We analyzed what our customers were doing with our platform. This is all based on how customers have been solving these problems themselves. Now we’ve just put it on a platform, in a context to be replicated on a constant basis,” he added, calling the platform “the amalgamation or sum of a bunch of the solutions or parts we’ve had in the past that we’re now putting in a new context.”

Much of the conference honed in on the problems enterprises faced trying to change course or move on from other legacy systems and platforms.

Dozens of researchers, analysts, lawyers and business leaders spoke at the MarketplaceLIVE conference about the changing landscape of data centers and the need for them to become much more flexible or agile.

Every enterprise’s data needs, and even location, may change at the drop of the hat, forcing companies like Digital Realty to move toward more malleable platforms that could adjust to business needs.

“Having MarketplaceLIVE be an annual event where we can think through and talk about what changes are happening in the industry and how we best adapt to the changes in technology is the goal. My hope is that every one of the attendees learns a little bit about Digital Realty, hopefully gives us a little insight so we learn from our customers, partners and analysts,” Dyer added.

“It’s really just an information exchange and an opportunity to connect people together and think through that.”