What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. Each video is an informal but in-depth video chat with a thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is Palmer and the guest are long-term acquaintances, so expect a lively conversation.

This week's chat is with with Jonathan Heiliger, founder of and general partner at Vertex Ventures US. Heiliger previously led Facebook’s infrastructure as it grew to support nearly 1 billion users, was COO of Opsware, and founded his first successful company before age 20.

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of the discussion that has been edited for length. To hear the rest, be sure to watch the video.

Matt Palmer: You recently had a post on the Vertex Ventures site that talked about the lost art of data center engineering, and that's definitely a topic near and dear to a significant portion of the SDxCentral audience because they're building data centers and they're also building edge data centers. Could you talk a little bit about where you see that as a lost art and what are the needs that you're seeing evolving on the data center engineering side?

Jonathan Heiliger: I've been thinking about this for a while, since the beginning of the year. At the top of June, I made a very short post about the lost art of data center engineering, and I got, as you would expect, a range of responses from people.

I think in one camp you have people that build data centers that would say, yeah, there's a shortage of construction talent and labor – being able to put shovels in the ground, not to mention design data centers to be efficient. For the last at least decade and a half, that's been a big, big focus of mine. And I think the industry is making data centers more efficient. We think about back when we were kids, you would design a data center that would sit in a closet, and it wasn't very efficient.

One of the things that I think Google started promoting was data center efficiency and this notion of power usage effectiveness, which we can talk about later. And basically part of that comes with scale, but part of that is also just how you design the data centers, the servers, and the applications in conjunction with one another. And we continued that work at Facebook with something called the Open Compute Project, which is now lots and lots of businesses. Something like $40 billion of servers and network equipment have gone through the Open Compute project, which is highly efficient data center designs coupled to the compute infrastructure.

But those are building blocks. If you zoom out for a second, you think about the software developer who might be in San Francisco or New York or Boston, coding their new cool travel app. They're not thinking about building buildings, and they're not thinking about putting GPUs inside those buildings, or the mechanical and electrical needs of that and how to get cooling to the right place, and whether or not it should be liquid cooling or air cooling. They're not thinking about any of that.

Hence why I think [that] for the last many years, many of the smartest engineers have built software but they haven't built data centers and done data center design and data center systems. And that's created a dearth of talent, starting at the design point all the way through the designing, building, and operating [of a] highly efficient data center. And I think that a few companies have benefited from that – people like Equinix, people like Digital Realty Trust, and smaller businesses like Iconic, and IPI, and cloudHQ, and others in the wholesale data center category because they've been able to rely on on quality talent and a really good real estate pipeline.

But at the same time, when trying to build a data center for the first time, I think one has to ask the question of, should I do this myself, or should I rely on some third party – starting with Amazon and Microsoft – who could build me an extension of their cloud compute systems, all the way down to someone who could design and build my own data center, just like you would a house.

Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries.