Digital Realty’s APAC Man Kumar Resigns

Kris Kumar, who has ran Digital Realty Trust’s business in Asia Pacific over the past two years, has left the company.

Digital Realty announced earlier this month the appointment of Bernard Geoghegan as Kumar’s replacement. Geoghegan is an inside hire, who until recently oversaw the company’s business in the EMEA region.

This is Geoghegan’s second run at Digital Realty. He originally joined the company in 2006 and stayed until 2010, when he left to work as executive vice president of the data center services division of the European service provider Colt. He rejoined Digital Realty as EMEA managing director last year.

The company has four data center properties in APAC – two in Australia, one in Singapore and one in Hong Kong. Its Singapore site is the largest of the four, measuring about 370,500 square feet total.

The 200,000-square-foot Hong Kong data center is second-largest. The Melbourne facility is about 100,000 square feet, and the Sydney one is about 90,000 square feet.

Kumar’s is a third recent departure of a senior Digital Realty team member. In August, its solutions director Michael Siteman left to work for a boutique IT solutions firm M-Theory Group in Los Angeles, and Rebecca Brese, who ran customer service and quality control, went to work at Compass Data Centers, a mid-market data center provider founded by another Digital Realty alumnus Chris Crosby.

Kumar has been senior vice president and regional head of Asia Pacific for Digital Realty since March 2012. He was vice president of corporate development and APAC regional head for two years prior to that.

Digital Realty, the world’s largest wholesale data center developer and landlord, has been undergoing big changes since the sudden departure of its founding CEO Michael Foust in March. The company has not yet selected a successor, steered by its CFO William Stein in the interim.

On its first-quarter earnings call, Digital Realty leadership announced some strategic changes, which included diversifying its product portfolio with more hands-on services than its traditional space-and-power offerings and selling off non-core and underperforming properties.

It reported year-over-year revenue growth for the second quarter and a slight drop in earnings per share. Its management also said they had made progress in identifying properties to divest.