Originally posted to LinkedIN Pulse by Ilissa Miller, CEO of iMPR, President of NEDAS and Founder of the Independent Data Center Alliance

It’s official, AT&T has completed its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, making waves and creating a fundamental shift throughout the realms of telecommunications and media. As the lines between telecommunications carriers and media titans become increasingly obfuscated, the battle for content control continues to evolve and the topology of global telecommunications begins to look less and less familiar. At the Independent Data Center Alliance (IND-DCA), our goal is to be in touch with industry talk so that we can serve as a source of news, thought leadership and critical perspective for operators throughout the telecom and communications infrastructure sphere. So, we’ve opened up a poll to get a read on how industry players are reacting to this shift, where they see its impacts and what opportunities may lay ahead for data center owners and operators. Here are some answers we’ve received so far:

Bill Betz, Vice President of Sales for DataGryd, a premier data center provider in New York City, notes, “From an AT&T perspective, they obviously are getting out of the data center business like most carriers and spun to Brookfield to create Evoque. From an enterprise content perspective like HBO, TNT, Warner Media, TBS and other streaming products, to compete with entities such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu, they are going to need data center space to process and distribute content at the ‘edge’. Also, they will be competing in the 5G wireless market and will need to distribute small cell technology everywhere.”

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