In recognition of the Melbourne (ME1) and Singapore (SG3) data center openings, this month’s spotlight is on Hisham Muhammad, the Asia-Pacific (AP) Global Solutions Architect (GSA) team’s director. Hisham lives in Singapore with his wife and their six-year old (“going on 16”) daughter. Balancing his technology career with his more creative talents, Hisham loves to cook, draw/paint and play rock/blues guitar.
Hisham’s career in IT-support spans more than 23 years, including working at Booz-Allen and Pihana Pacific, which merged with Equinix in 2003. Hisham has a broad mix of skills, including solution-selling and network engineering, global network management for multinationals, data center construction project management and product management. These experiences have given him a unique perspective on how businesses are consuming technology and the cultures/norms fueling business decisions among the different AP regions.
As the rate of enterprise cloud consumption rapidly grows, Hisham helps enterprise CIOs better understand how to deploy their IT roadmaps and implement enterprise-grade hybrid cloud solutions. According to Hisham, “The key is understanding the power of interconnections and ecosystems.”
Q: What is the top challenge the technology leaders you work with face today?
A: Most of our customers are trying to understand how to do business in Asia, specifically setting up their regional aggregation hubs in Equinix/AP metros. They want proximity to certain business ecosystems, the most cloud and network service providers and FOREX matching engines.
Our multinational customers are exploring how potential business partners can help them grow their operations in AP and our AP customers are looking for ways to expand into the Americas and EMEA. Interconnection between our customers and these partners is critical to their AP and global expansion goals.
Q: What other major things do you see businesses trying to achieve in Asia-Pacific?
We see a lot of companies striving to create on-demand infrastructures that leverage hybrid multi-clouds to address their business demands. I discuss this growing trend in more detail in my blog “Increasing Clouds over Asia-Pacific.”
Businesses also need help deploying enterprise mobile content, applications and the three Cs: Content Distribution Architecture, Connectivity Options and Cloud Infrastructure. Once implemented, these solutions need to be replicated across multiple regions, markets and business partners.
Q: What is most rewarding about working with Equinix customers?
A: It’s the journey and the level of trust that’s built as we work with customers’ stakeholders through their challenges toward their end goals. A lot of times we are building business solutions for new markets. Or, we’re helping a CIO who just inherited multiple technology platforms and SLAs after a business merger or acquisition.
These requirements tend to stretch your capabilities and are complex in nature. Being able to see through complexity and then pull everything together are the key ingredients to making our customers successful.
Q: How will the Melbourne opening help you better address your customers’ business needs?
A: With Melbourne, we’re extending our data center/interconnection platforms within our existing customer base, especially the network and cloud service providers. At the same time, we’re providing new customers that are either headquartered or have a large presence in Melbourne – or plan to create a geo-redundant infrastructure – with the ability to leverage our Melbourne-Sydney data centers to implement their solutions.
Q: And what about your new Singapore IBX?
A: Singapore is Asia’s most geographically interconnected city and Equinix SG1 is its carrier hub, with more than 190 network service providers. SG3 sits right next to SG1 and helps our service providers and enterprise customers meet their demands to host their mission-critical infrastructures at those sites.
In addition, SG3 is designed to meet the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) data center outsourcing guidelines for financial institutions, a huge vertical throughout Singapore. Meeting MAS guidelines is the only way a financial institution’s data center can meet the criteria for the financial services threat and vulnerability risk assessment (TVRA), a critical requirement for providing financial services worldwide.
Want to learn more about how Equinix can help you grow your business in Asia-Pacific?
Contact our regional GSA Teams.
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