Equinix names company veteran Meyers, most recently their President of Strategy, Services and Innovation, as President and CEO. He talks with ChannelBuzz about the opportunities he sees in the market, and how the company can best leverage them, including how their channel fits in.

Interconnect and colocation provider Equinix has announced that Charles Meyers has been named to the positions of President and CEO, effective immediately. Meyers will also join Equinix’s Board of Directors. Meyers succeeds Peter Van Camp, who had been interim CEO since January 2018, when former longtime CEO Steve Smith resigned for exercising what the company said was poor judgement with respect to an employee matter.  Van Camp resumes his role as Executive Chairman of the Equinix Board of Directors.

Meyers, who has been in the IT industry for 25 years, joined Equinix in 2010 as President, Americas, the company’s largest operating region. He oversaw significant growth and strong operating performance there. In 2013, he became Chief Operating Officer, where he led the Global Sales, Marketing, Operations and Customer Success teams. Over the last year, he has served as President of Strategy, Services and Innovation [SSI], overseeing the company’s product organization, and leading the technology, strategy and business development teams.

“I think that having that broad breadth of exposure in terms of being in key roles within Equinix appealed to our Board,” Meyers told ChannelBuzz. “I had a deep operating role in terms of running our largest region, and have also worked on the product and innovation side of the house. I also have a track record of being able to build world class teams and inspire them to execute, and have done that both here and at other companies in the past. I think that’s why the Board thought that this was the best path forward for the company.”

As an internal candidate for the position who had been in charge of the company’s strategy before, it’s no great surprise that Meyers doesn’t see a need as CEO to make major changes to the company’s strategy. However he emphasized that the company is in a very strong position in terms of its strength in the market. Performance had nothing to do with the resignation of the previous CEO.

“Digital transformation has become central to the agenda of so many companies and industries today,” he said. “They are rapidly reaching the conclusion that hybrid and multi-cloud are their architectures of choice. Our platform provides a very unique opportunity for them to meet those digital transformational needs. That has been the central thesis for the company and our focus, and that won’t change.  Expanding our global reach and our digital ecosystems – resulting in our ability to help customers drive their digital transformation agenda – remains the strategy. To support that, we need to continue to evolve our capabilities, product set and go-to-market motions, so the strategy will continually evolve.”

Meyers emphasized that he sees the ability to create leverage within an organization as a key ingredient in success.

“This is something that I talk about a lot,” he said. “The most powerful source of leverage in organizations is people, and the priority is  building a set of capabilities that allow you to motivate and retain the best people  We have an internal development and leadership program here called Archimedes that I developed elsewhere and brought to Equinix. It reflects a continued commitment to our people and culture, and I make it a central part of my priorities.”

Further leveraging the Equinix channel will also be a key part of the strategy going forward.

“The channel will be a key part of how our strategy will continue to evolve,” he said. “There are a couple of different dimensions to this. First, we will expand the depth and breadth of our relationship with partners who have extremely well-developed channels of their own. One example is Microsoft around Azure. It’s a great example where we can mobilize their channel to our joint success. With Cisco, it’s the same thing. They are a key partner around enterprise networking needs, and we can jointly develop solutions they can put through their large and prolific channel. A third example is AT&T, which brings their connectivity solutions together with us to deliver an exceptional solution for their customers.”

The other channel component is adding more services that the channel can deliver.

“The other dimension, as we continue to evolve our services platform, is to deliver a richer set of services and make those more channel-ready,” Meyers said. “Our Performance Hub Solution is a great example.”