Mike changes so often here is the latest on his job change.

Talking to a few friends we were discussing Mike Manos's running Digital Realty Trust's POD development. The conversations was, “Oh did you hear. He got more. He did??? What? Mike got Operations, Operation Engineering, and Future Innovation with Jim Smith the CTO. Hey doesn't this look like the way Mike organized his group at Microsoft? Yes it does. And, now he reports to the CEO.”

As we look to the challenges ahead we are faced with the kinds of problems all companies wish they had. We are challenged by an increased amount of customer demand for capacity coupled with a desire for the most technologically advanced facilities in the market today. Additionally new offerings such as Pod Architecture Services is giving us visibility and penetration into opportunities that historically we could not be a part of. This considerable growth is combined with an increasing amount of complexity in managing a world-wide facility portfolio of tens of facilities with power capacity that is measured in the hundreds of megawatts!

Mike has used his organizational skills to pull a team together that rivals will have a hard to match. Why? Because Mike can perform data center organizational magic, and people like to work for him.

You may not have thought as Digital Realty Trust as a construction company, and they aren't a typical construction management solution. They are out to drive a change in the data center industry by looking at the TCO to provide data center services. This may not be as sexy as watching Apple and Google data center moves, but it is going to drive significant changes.

One of the changes coming through the industry is combination of IT with Facilities/Real Estate in Site Selection, Design, and Construction of Data Centers. There are data center rules ready to be broken as others figure out how much these rules limit and increase data center costs. We are about to see data centers built in totally different ways in places you would not typically consider. In this recession, there are huge opportunities for those who can see a different way of business to take advantage of the economic incentives by federal, state, and local gov’t.

Here is a tough question I haven’t seen many people ask. We have these long list of site selection and design criteria, how do each of these criteria affect the TCO of our data center? If we are going to have a lower TCO shouldn’t we question the requirements and understand how much it costs.

You mean I could lower my TCO by changing the requirements? Well, yeh. Don’t you think that is easier to do, than adopting the latest technology with the hope of a high ROI.

There are a few who are thinking this way, and it is fun discussing how data center costs could be dramatically lower than the competition. You know Google thinks this way, but we usually have to wait 3 years before they share their ideas.

I think Mike sees the way things are shifting, and has a vision which is why he has acted so quickly at Digital Realty Trust.

Are you ready?