Equinix Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm Brendan Lynch. I cover REITs here at Barclays. Very happy to be with the Equinix team, Arkell Shaw and Ryan Burke. Arkell, you have been the President of the Americas for just over about a year now. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about your responsibilities and maybe about your prior responsibilities as SVP of Sales in the Americas.

Sure. Thank you, and it's a pleasure to be here today, and thank you for having us. In my capacity as the President, I am responsible for our growth strategy in the Americas, and the Americas for us is everything from Canada all the way down to Chile and Argentina. I have responsibility for corporate development, I have responsibility for our business development, and then also the growth that comes from those investments that we're making. Prior to that, I ran sales for the Americas as SVP of Sales, so I did that for about six years. I think that brought a unique lens to where I see things from as a President now.

Great. I think you've kind of led the change in the go-to-market strategy in your prior role at the firm. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the changes that you wanted to see and how you executed on it.

Yeah. I came into the company. We've been such an incredible story of growth over our 28-plus years, and when I came in about seven years ago, it'll actually be officially seven years at the end of this month, we were doing exceptionally well, and we needed more. We had been approaching the enterprise space very effectively. We were starting to see, and there was a journey to the cloud. There was starting to be a conversation around repatriation, potentially. We also wanted to significantly increase revenue growth. What I went about doing when I came in, is putting together probably a more structured approach against the segments that we had. Rather than treating every customer equally, we have small and medium-sized customers and large customers.

We had verticalization that was important in terms of stronger. We play very well in the financial services, for example, so making sure that we had the right focus around that. It was really bringing a consistent focus around how we managed the go-to-market strategy against the different customers that we had, so we could really differentiate. One of the things that we saw was the fact that we had so many Fortune 500, Fortune 100, Fortune 1000 customers, but we had a small bit of their business. So really understanding the role. I think seven years ago, people thought of data centers as a box and didn't know very much about what happened in that box, and we have such a different value proposition in terms of an ecosystem that lives in that.

Working with our customers around the digital transformation that they were going through, and aligning our sales organization so they could effectively go after that opportunity in the market, and it proved to be quite good in terms of the growth rate that we saw coming off of that and bookings growth.

I think the whole world is getting an education in data centers over the past couple of years.

Yes, definitely. In terms of the go-to-market strategy, certainly the data center market has evolved over the last 2 to 3 years.

How should we think about your positioning the sales force and your go-to-market strategy now, and is it continuing to evolve as we see AI enterprise and AI inferencing demand start to ramp?

Yeah, absolutely. We have a new CRO. He's not new anymore. I think he can officially be called tenured. He's been here over a year. Shane Paladin, and he has introduced, again, a go-to-market strategy that's evolved with what's happening in the marketplace, which is important for any sales organization to do. What we're seeing is the differentiation in terms of where the opportunity is and the different ways in terms of how customers are served. We have almost 11,000 customers, which is really different from any other data center operator. Those customers are not all served the same way, and we have very small, and we have very large customers, and everything in between.

Being able to effectively serve those customers in a way that allows us to move as quickly as is necessary to capture the opportunity, but to do it in a way that is meaningful for that segment is important. For example, in the small size business, we use many more partners, and we have a robust channel organization. Whereas you go upmarket and you start to look at some of the very large enterprises that we have, and they have very dedicated, bigger teams that support them on a global basis, and then everything in between. So that's how we align.

Great. Maybe we can talk about enterprise demand and how customers' capacity requirements are evolving as AI adoption accelerates, and what you're seeing on the ground now.

Yeah. Well, it's definitely evolving, and what I would say is we've seen this over the last few years just in terms of the increased size of capacity that they need. The workloads that they're placing with us in our data centers and across the industry are drawing more power. They require greater density. We're seeing that shift. Whereas a 250 kVA deal was a large deal for us, a megawatt is kind of the going thing now. That's a big shift that's occurred over a number of years. What we're also seeing is AI has really taken off. Enterprise is a little bit slower in that, and I think there's reasons for that. The enterprises are the businesses that have to make the investment in infrastructure and all of the changes that AI might be driving.

I think that up until last year, I was just sharing this in one of the meetings we were in, if you talk to an AI company or you talk to a hyperscaler, they were all in on what was happening with AI. When you talk to enterprise customers, we ask the question of, "What's your AI strategy?" The majority in the room were contemplating it but had not embarked on developing a strategy. They were dealing with what we would call Shadow AI shops, where there were people using AI, but they still hadn't stepped into actually driving a strategy. This year when we met with that same group of customers, they all were heavily invested in building that strategy and implementing a strategy.