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ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT TO THE MINNEAPOLIS /ST. PAUL BUSINESS JOURNAL By Holly Dolezalek Contributing writer he Minneapolis -St. Paul TBusiness Journal held a panel discussion on the topic of data cen- ters recently. Panelists included Graham Wil- liams, chief operating officer of Cologix; Steve Knutson, chief technology officer and chief information officer for Marco; Kam Patel, director of global data center solutions at CommScope; and Ernest Sampera, chief marketing officer for vXchnge. The moderator was Aman- da Othoudt, economic development director for the city of Elk River, which is home to two fortune 50 data cen- ters and has a 33 -acre, shovel -ready data center site available. Othoudt: Why are enterprises turn- ing to data center services and what are the key considerations in their selection? Williams: We see three big demand - driving trends. One of those is that enterprises are increasingly outsourc- ing their data center needs to third - party providers. They originally built their own data centers five to 10 years ago, and those data centers are now coming to the end of their useful life. Enterprises are now having to decide whether to rebuild or look at alterna- tives where they can effectively pay for what they use on a service basis for a monthly fee and let someone else manage that infrastructure. There are four key considerations. The first is that a lot of enterprises are realizing that managing and maintaining gen- erators is not their core competency, and that their focus is on goods and services, so they rely on experts to help them keep their focus on what they do best. The second is that they like the idea of a monthly fee for a service more than writing a big check; CFOs are having a harder time justi- fying big capital checks for internal data center equipment and servic- es. The third is that having access to a lot of different networks provides flexibility and drives costs down, due to providers competing against each other to offer the best price. Finally, enterprises are not sure how they're going to use the cloud. They want to future -proof their model so they can use some of their own infrastructure and then access service providers and not have to physically move servers to access providers in the future. Sampera: The pace of innovation is what we see driving the need for data center services. It has become far less about physical space and more about getting enough power and cooling to the footprint they need. There used to be a case for an enterprise owning and maintaining its own facility. How- ever now, as technology and meth- odologies have introduced concepts like hyperscale and hypercloud, it no longer makes sense for the business to spend the CapEx and IT resourc- es on the less flexible, less scalable private data center. What enterprises are really seeking is reliable, secure space, power and cooling for their ever - shrinking footprint. Interconnectivity is the other piece that makes data centers so attractive to enterprises. With a private data center, you're likely to have one or per- haps two carriers servicing the facil- ity. However, that connectivity para- digm leaves you open to the whims of those carriers in terms of pricing, service, maintenance, etc., and leaves you open to myriad security threats. By choosing space and power at a purpose -built facility that has a carri- er- neutral environment, you're open- ing up considerable new options and leveraging a more secure, compliant environment. Knutson: We work with the end user, with a lot of SMBs who don't know what it means to move to the cloud or move to a data center, and how they connect to the data cen- ter. They think it's a universal solu- tion for optimum performance and cost savings, when that's not always the case. So we help the customer decide if data center services make sense based on this criteria. Patel: We focus a lot on the For- tune 500, and we've seen a variety of customers migrate to the cloud. APRIL 28, 2017 25 We'll also see outsourcing to the pub- lic cloud; a lot of customers are send- ing workloads, but it depends on the size of the enterprise. SMBs are more likely to go to the public cloud, as opposed to the larger players. They don't want to be the experts on build- ing their own data centers, because they've had this experience where they built a building that was sup- posed to last 20 years, and at that time they might have needed 5 kilo- watts per rack but now they need 40 kilowatts per rack. I've been to plenty of data centers where there's plenty of square footage, but they can't add any more equipment because they're out of power. Another big consider- ations is fiber diversity in the region. People want to move to where Inter- net exchanges are. Building a data center in a smaller metro may have fewer carrier choices than in larger metros. Some metros may even have direct access to other regions such as Asia, Africa, South America or Austra- lia. With applications like 5G and self - driving cars, that's driving a need for lower latency, which means more data centers in smaller locations. Othoudt: What are you seeing in the migration process from on- premise to the cloud? Knutson: If a customer has decid- ed to move to the cloud, that usual- ly entails moving part or all of their