VMware Cloud Services Chief Bill Fathers Joins Telx Board

Bill Fathers, the man in charge of VMware’s cloud services business, has joined the board of directors of Telx, one of the biggest colocation and interconnection service providers in the U.S.

As Telx and its peers in the data center provider space race to win business from cloud companies, it is advantageous to have a board member like Fathers, who runs the cloud services unit at one of the most important companies in the enterprise cloud space.

According to a Telx statement, Fathers will advise the company on sales, marketing, product development and operations. “His [Fathers’] deep understanding of our business will help continue driving Telx’s success as a premier data center solution provider that fuels infrastructure, interconnection and business progress for our customers,” Telx CEO Chris Downie said.

Companies like Telx have taken the role of marketplace enablers for the ecosystem of cloud service providers and their customers. Telx has traditionally emphasized its role as an operator of hubs where network operators, service providers and end users interconnect.

Being a host and interconnection enabler for a diverse group of players puts it in a good position to build a cloud ecosystem. Telx’s competitor Equinix has devised a similar model.

VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering geared toward enterprises, fits the profile of a provider that would use Telx facilities to reach customers. The company rolled the service out in May 2013 and said it would use colocation providers to host the infrastructure to support it, but has been hesitant to say publicly who those providers were.

The company is offering seamless integration between customers’ own VMware vSphere environments with its public cloud, including automatic extension of their networking environment onto the VMware-operated infrastructure in colocation data centers.

Downie has become the permanent Telx CEO only recently. He replaced the company’s previous chief exec Eric Shepcaro – who passed away last May – first as temporary CEO and now as a permanent replacement.