A chat with Evoque & Foghorn CEOs about Their New Relationship

A chat with Evoque & Foghorn CEOs about Their New Relationship

August 05

 

Kevin: Welcome to Evoque Insights. We’re super excited to have the CEO of Evoque Data Center Solutions, Andy Stewart, and the CEO of Foghorn consulting, Peter Roosakos, join us today. So, for those not yet familiar with Evoque and Foghorn, can you just break down what your companies do?

Andy: So Evoque started as the carve out of AT&T to use co-location business. We’re about two and a half years old. We started with 31 data centers around the globe and purely focus on space, power, and connectivity.

Kevin: And Alex, what’s Foghorn’s backstory and history?

Peter: In terms of a high-level overview, we like to start with the pain and the pain point that we solve is really helping companies be more competitive using the cloud. We’ve been building, transforming and scaling cloud environments back since 2008, which seems like forever ago. And we’ve done so though with a more scalable approach to services with a focus on infrastructure as code, which we call FogSource and team-based cloud engineering services approach, which we call FogOps, both of which really benefit our customers because we can scale together with our customers.

So we’re an Amazon web services, premier tier partner with our dev ops and security competencies, among many other certifications. We’re also Azure gold partners and GCP consulting partners. And ultimately, we’re in business to allow our clients to focus on their core differentiator while we architect and implement the infrastructure that empowers that differentiator, which is their applications.

Kevin: So, we brought you both together today to share some exciting news. Andy, do you want to share with everybody?

Andy: Yeah. We’re really excited to announce that Evoque has acquired Foghorn and acquisition can be a bad word sometimes, it really is the combination of our two businesses. One of the things that I told our side as the deal was going through was like the first rule is don’t screw it up.

Foghorn has made this, created this a great business. We don’t want them to lose their culture or the agility or the creativity they have.

Peter: Yeah, first and foremost for us, our customers now have additional choices for their infrastructure roadmap. That include, of course, colocation capabilities as well as enhanced commercial flexibility which really allows them to leverage their spend on whatever infrastructure will best optimize their applications.

For our customers, additional choices means additional flexibility, less infrastructure lock-in, which is more and more important in this agile and lean competitive landscape that exists. And our combination with Evoque will really allow us to continue to build on our desire to sit on the customer side of the table when evaluating infrastructure alternatives, and then we can architect and implement the infrastructure roadmap.

But the bottom line is that our customers will have more choices, more flexibility, more agility, and ultimately that will allow them to be more competitive and innovate faster.

Kevin: Alex, how do you see your team integrating with Evoque?

Peter: Yes. Great question, Kevin. Those of us who started Foghorn have been through acquisitions before. One of the things that attracted us to Evoque was really the alignment that we had around culture and approach with Andy, the board, and the leadership team. And we truly see our team seamlessly integrating into Evoque and our rollout of the Multi-Generational Infrastructure is really the first example of that.

Kevin: So, Andy, as as part of this new alliance, you are going to market with an application first infrastructure agnostic philosophy called Multi-Generational Infrastructure. Can you break down what MGI is in a nutshell?

Andy: Yeah, absolutely. In the past, I think people have tried to force the application into certain infrastructure. It was a cloud first strategy – we went from everything in the cloud, or it was everything went into my data center in colo, and that’s really the wrong way to look at it. It needs to be an application first approach.

Peter: At Foghorn, we’ve been practicing this application first approach forever and are super excited to take it to the next level with MGI. We’ve seen the value over the years and the benefit of letting the applications drive the infrastructure and together with Evoque, we’re excited to expand that out to a wider variety of clientele.

And more and more enterprises are adopting this approach. So not to sound like a broken record, but it’s all about helping companies be more competitive and this application first MGI approach really allows that to happen.

Kevin: That’s excellent. I would, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. In the era of cloud colocation has also grown. What do you think are some of the drivers of this reality?

Peter: Yeah, for sure. And you’d think that as enterprises use more cloud, that their colocation usage might decline as a result. And although most of our enterprise clients leverage both the public cloud, as well as colocation services, we really see both of those environments growing as our client’s workloads grow. And there are definitely workloads that are moving to the cloud, but at the same time, those workloads that don’t move to the cloud are growing as well. And in today’s world, nearly all companies are delivering some level of service digitally.

And if the company is growing, then there’s going to be growing infrastructure to support that business.

Kevin:  Andy, from the colocation perspective, how have you seen the cloud era impact demand?

Andy: Yeah, so we’ve seen a consistent growth and colo enterprise customers continuing to roll out, but we’ve also seen applications leave our data centers and go into the cloud.

As opposed to being on the receiving end of a call of churn, we would much rather be a part of that conversation with customers – helping them be successful, even introducing the idea of portability of spend. Something may make sense to be in co-location today. If it makes more sense to be in the cloud a year from now, let us help you with the evolution and let us help you shift.

Kevin: Well, cloud, colocation, Foghorn, Evoque… This alignment sounds like a true win-win for your customers and for the industry. Congratulations on having a more robust tool set to solve more problems for more customers.

Andy:  We’re super excited to roll it out, and, like you said, really help customers be even more successful in down the road.

Peter: Thank you. Ultimately I’m a broken record, but this is about helping our customers innovate and be more competitive and successful in their industry. And we’re super excited to do that together with Evoque.

 

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