As the Virtualization Technology Users Group Winter Warmer 2017 took place at Gillette Stadium, the home of the New England Patriots, it seems fitting that one of Expedient’s strengths as a managed data provider is an emphasis on its regional (East Coast and Midwest U.S.) network. There is the familiarity aspect of regionalism — companies know you, and you know them — but there is also the physics of closeness to the data.

Some companies can generate up to 15 petabytes of data a day; it’s not feasible to send all that data out to where the cloud provider lives and to do an analysis on it, according to John White, VP of product strategy at Expedient.

“The wait time is just too large, the connectivity would be too expensive,” he explained. He recently joined Stu Miniman (@stu), senior analyst at Wikibon and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during VTUG Winter Warmer 2017, held in Foxborough, MA. Miniman and White discussed how Expedient helps customers with their data, as well as how they are expanding their global reach.

Large businesses are leaving the infrastructure game

In 2016, 35 percent of Expedient’s new sales were focused on private cloud, white said. The company also found that the disaster recovery as a service practice doubled. Data centers are still booming and co-lo services are growing faster than ever.

“Digital transformation — the term is big and huge — it’s starting to be reflected in a lot of these businesses,” said White. Many in-house IT organizations are not equipped to run the required operational tasks, as more large businesses are looking to exit the infrastructure game and leave it up to the experts to run. Expedient has been building its business on this for the past decade, so it has achieved operational efficiencies and can handle the required loads, freeing up customers’ in-house resources to concentrate on their strategic businesses, White explained.

Living regionally, reaching globally

Even though Expedient is focused on regional capabilities, it can easily collaborate with other companies to have global reach. The company has found that it is not necessary to build a data center every place you put a private cloud; it’s better to have an Expedient data center, and then go interconnect with them.

In February, Expedient is looking forward to using VMware’s NSX, which will be used to create a “layer 2 VPN” across public internet, so when private clouds are run onsite, it will be over public internet. NSX will create a bridge between sites, making it easy to move virtual machines as needed, White explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2017.

Photo by SiliconANGLE