My colleague Alex Winogradoff (alex dot winogradoff at gartner dot com) has begun to pick up an increasing percentage of the colocation inquiry that myself and Ted Chamberlin have previously taken. Ted and I are both hugely busy (if you don’t know him, Ted is my co-author on the Magic Quadrant, and is our primary guy covering the purchase of network services), and Alex has been assigned to learn the data center market, which remains a hot topic among our clients.

Alex is interested in talking with a broad range of colocation and turnkey data center leasing vendors, since these are highly localized markets where we routinely see a mix of global, national, regional, and local players in any given deal that a buyer asks us to look at. Whether or not you’re a client, you can contact Alex and ask to brief him; I highly encourage you to do so if you are a vendor in this space serving typical Gartner clients (mid-sized business, enterprise, government, and technology vendors, primarily).

Alex has spent his career focused on carriers and other network operators. Since he’s relatively new to the data center market, this is a great opportunity to educate him about what you offer, and influence his thinking on the space, as he begins to shape his research agenda.

And for you industry-watchers: Retail colocation remains a relatively weak market this year, but wholesale colocation and data center leasing are certainly growing significantly, both in volume of deals and the degree to which they’re playing a major part in data center sourcing decisions.