As theCube was extracting signal from the noise at the recently concluded ServiceNow Knowledge 13 event, we got a chance to chat with Brian Lillie, CIO of Equinox.

Equinox is a global data center provider with 97 datacenters in 15 countries, and over 500 cloud providers that host with them around the world. Aside from being high-end, operational, and reliable, the company prides itself for being network neutral with 900 carriers in their facilities.

“If you’re a cloud provider or a content provider, and you wanna provide information and access in the lowest latency, highest reliability way to eyeballs all over the world, Equinox is the place to be.”

Lillie is a great fan of ServiceNow, and it shows. When he came to Equinox four-and-a-half years ago, they had achieved significant organic growth and acquired companies in Europe and Asia, but they hadn’t released a cohesive strategy for integrating that development.  Equinox had six or seven very different systems, and everyone was busy just getting their own processes to work. With ServiceNow’s catchy Cloud for Clunkers program, Equinox was able to manage everything in one place, and now they’re running their businesses more like a business.

See Lillie’s entire segment below:

Before the interview ended, Dave Vellane asked Lillie to give his fellow CIOs out there some advice. “Start with something you know, something that you can get your arms around,” Lillie says, going on to offer these tidbits:

1.) What are the services that you offer as the CIO to the business and mask the complexity of who provides those services to the end user. Don’t make them choose.

2.) As a CIO, you’ve got to be a leader. Demand that the data is in there and demand that we have one process; one system, one set of processes, consistent. You’re gonna get people to say, ‘We’ll it’s different in Germany,’ ‘It’s different in Singapore.’ Delivering IT is delivering IT.”