Digital Realty's Brese Joins Former Colleague Chris Crosby's Compass

Compass Data Centers announced that Rebecca Brese has joined its executive management team. Brese comes from Digital Realty Trust, where she was integral in creating a framework for customer service and quality control.

Brese will do similar work for Compass, where she will be responsible for customer experience. She will work closely with the developer's delivery partners on continuous improvement and quality of the products and services they provide to Compass. Compass CEO and co-founder Chris Crosby, also a Digital Realty alumnus, has worked with Brese in the past.

Crosby and developer Chris Curtis formed Compass in 2011. The Dallas-based company recently raised $100 million of investor money to help its next stage of growth.

Compass has a standardized design for a 1.2 megawatt data center it claims it can build quickly anywhere a customer desires, targeting primarily second-tier U.S. markets. Now, with three service provider customers and a few completed data center builds under its belt, the company is looking at further expansion. As it grows, customer relations grow in importance, and. Brese will help establish these processes.

“One of our core convictions at Compass is to continually improve on our ability to deliver a high-quality product and customer experience via effective processes and systems," Crosby said. "In her new role, Rebecca will be integral in helping to establish Compass as a company whose processes and practices directly benefit our customers’ ability to successfully deliver their own mission critical applications.”

Brese has over 23 years of overall experience in the IT customer service field, including a long tenure at Digital Realty, which started in 2007. She designed and managed Digital Realty’s client service organization, which includes 13 global customer service centers and is credited for redefining customer support in the wholesale data center market.

Brese earned her undergraduate degree from Southeastern Oklahoma State University and is a graduate of SMU Cox School of Business Management.

“I couldn’t be happier to be part of the Compass team and working along so many people who are shaping the next phase of our industry’s growth,” said Brese. “Chris Crosby is a true visionary in our industry, and I had the pleasure of working alongside him several years ago when he was playing such an instrumental role in creating the wholesale data center model, which provided such an elegantly simple solution to the ‘build vs buy’ debate that had existed in our industry for eons.

"Now Chris and the Compass team are pioneering a new phase of our industry’s evolution with their methodology for providing dedicated data center facilities anywhere—which eliminates the frustrating compromises that have existed with the multi-tenant, major market-centric model that has predominated. This model is all about customers, which is part of why it is so exciting to me.”

Compass has great momentum. It built a data center for Iron Mountain in Northborough, Massachusetts (just outside of Boston). It also recently completed a build in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for CenturyLink, and hosting company Windstream is using its facilities near Nashville, Tennessee, and in Durham, North Carolina.

Compass owns a piece of land near Columbus, Ohio, but has not yet announced a client for that location. Expansion plans are still focused on North America, including development on the Ohio property.

Announcement of Brese's appointment followed announcement of another departure from Digital Realty's management team. Michael Siteman, who used to be solutions director at Digital Realty, has joined a boutique Los Angeles-based private-cloud solutions provider M-Theory Group.