William Stein, CEO of Digital Realty Trust (NYSE: DLR), joined Nareit for a video interview at REITworld 2017.
Digital Realty is a global provider of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions.
Stein highlighted some of the distinguishing features of Digital Realty, including its high level of reliability.
Across the company’s 180 data centers in 40 markets, Digital Realty has achieved “five nines” of uptime – or 99.999 percent availability - every year for the last 10 years, including during last summer’s hurricanes, Stein said. “That is not the track record of a commodity real estate operator,” he observed.
Digital Realty also owns “irreplaceable, iconic” assets that tend to be legacy telecommunications buildings located in major metropolitan areas that are “incredibly network dense,” according to Stein. The company also owns a significant amount of land on its data center campuses to “future-proof” its customers’ needs, he added.
Technology continues to drive Digital Realty’s business at a higher growth rate than that of the overall economy, “and I would expect that to continue,” Stein said. Demand from cloud service providers will be a considerable source of growth for the short to medium term, he added.
Looking ahead, further technological advances in the areas of artificial intelligence, the internet of things, virtual reality and autonomous driving all support Digital Realty’s future growth curve, Stein said.