Employee Spotlight: Reda Saidi, Director of Product Development

Name: Reda Saidi

Title: Director, Product Development

QTS Location: Ashburn, VA

How long have you been with QTS? 4 years

What do you love most about your position?

1. Innovation and the excitement about developing advanced applications to empower QTS to differentiate in the marketplace
2. Team environment and the opportunity to work with hardworking QTSers across the organization and in geographically dispersed locations
3. Digitization

What led you to this position? How did you end up where you are today with QTS?

1. Education and previous experience with one of the leading private cloud providers
2. Passion about product development and working with engineers across the organization
3. Working with cross functional teams and ability to bounce ideas and get ideas from leadership
4. Ability to showcase new technologies and new tools to the entire organization in addition to customers

What can you share about the Service Delivery Platform projects you have had a hand in leading?

1. 3D Mapper: Digitize the data center footprint for QTSers and customers. This tool is pretty powerful and integrates core business platforms for the benefit to showcase metrics in a 3-dimensional view
2. Slackbot: leveraging our existing APIs to allow for easy integration between stakeholders and APIs via a Slack channel
3. Asset Management: pulling key metrics into SDP and allowing customers to manage their environment
4. Online Ordering and the migration of historical cross connect into SDP. Customers will be able to view their entire inventory in one place and without having to contact a QTS person for details
5. Integration with billing for invoicing and pushing key metrics to the billing platform to generate customer invoices

What value will these projects bring to our customers?

1. Empowerment as customers become more self sufficient
2. Transparency: customers have the ability to view their own data without in SDP UI or via APIs without the need to submit a request for a QTSer to generate the data for them
3. Close to real time reporting for major applications, including Power Analytics and Badging

What enhancements will the QTS Innovation Lab bring to your department and the company as a whole?

1. Innovation and challenging the status quo
2. New and optimized processes to streamline key aspects of the business and make every QTSer work more efficient
3. Advanced tracking and audit logging capabilities. Tracking data about important aspects of the business and this data is used to come up with predictive models which allow us to increase efficiencies and reduce costs

What SDP initiatives are you most excited about for 2020?

1. 3D Mapper and Heat Map as being one if not the core function within SDP. Through 3D Mapper, customers can view the health of their environment as well as manage all aspects of their business. i.e. ordering a Switchboard or a Cross Connect, viewing who’s currently on asset, filling their racks with devices, viewing power and sensor metrics, etc.
2. Slackbot: SDP can respond to stakeholder requests as a subject matter expert would and in matter of seconds
3. Predictive Analytics: allow QTSers and customer to predict their future consumption and take preventive measures to make their space more efficient
4. Face Recognition and Camera system integration
5. 4^th Wall
6. Project Amp

What passions do you have outside of work?

1. Spending quality time with my 2 boys
2. Traveling and discovering new cultures
3. Playing Tennis
4. Reading
5. Food tasting
6. Enjoying Ping Pong games with coworkers

What makes QTS different from other places you’ve worked?

• The people. Everyone I work with is very pleasant, fun to work with and is trying his/her best to make QTS a very successful company
• Leadership. Our leaders are great are what they do, they provide plenty of opportunities for growth and are open to suggestions on how to make QTS a more successful company
• My coworkers are family to me. I spend time with several of them outside of work, they know my family and I know theirs. Working with people like these is not very common within an industry where everyone is very busy