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Bringing the Edge to Emerging Markets with Joe Zhu, CEO of Zenlayer
In this interview, Joe discusses Zenlayer’s evolution from edge data center provider to the goal of becoming the world’s #1 edge cloud provider, as well as Zenlayer’s focus on being a truly global company and its unique capability and passion for serving emerging markets
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Joe Zhu is the Founder and CEO of Zenlayer, an edge cloud services provider. As a telecommunications professional with over 20 years of experience in the Pacific region, Joe has always been passionate about the exchange of ideas and commerce between Asia and the rest of the world. Prior to founding Zenlayer, Joe was the SVP of Global Business at ChinaCache, where he built the global business unit of China’s largest CDN provider. He also worked as the Director of Network Operations at China Telecom (USA), where he oversaw China Telecom’s North American network operations and led the development of China Telecom’s global peering policy.
Episode Notes:
Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Joe Zhu*, Founder and CEO of Zenlayer.
Joe founded Zenlayer in 2014 after 8 years of managing global business for ChinaCache, China’s largest CDN provider.
In this interview, Joe discusses Zenlayer’s evolution from edge data center provider to the goal of becoming the world’s #1 edge cloud provider, as well as Zenlayer’s focus on being a truly global company and its unique capability and passion for serving emerging markets
Key Quotes:
“It’s always been my ambition to become a global company, because my passion is to improve the global user experience, not just individual regions.”
“Our choice is to go to emerging markets, so-called underserved markets like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Russia, Brazil, where the infrastructure is not as good as in what we call mature markets like the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea. But the user base is huge and their mobile users have dramatically increased year over year, and they have a bigger population as well as a GDP increase.”
“Even though our strategy is to go to the emerging markets first, our customers need global coverage. Because the experience is not just for one location. It’s going to be for global users.”
“Online education is huge. We have a customer that has, say, the teacher in Dallas or Montana, but the students are in Asia. They’re learning English. So that millisecond of delay is really important. There are so many components that will make it stop working.”
“Obviously we don’t know what’s the next killer app yet. There will be a new killer app coming online. Is it a different type of e-commerce or different type of social application or different kind of a live streaming? Just imagine in the future, for example, you and I sitting in the same room, like a projection. But that requires a lot of bandwidth.”
Sponsors
Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.
The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Packet, an Equinix company. Packet is the leader in bare metal automation. They are on a mission to protect, connect, and power the digital world with developer-friendly physical infrastructure and a neutral, interconnected ecosystem that spans over 55 global markets. Learn more at Zenlayer.com/Edge
