Equinix, Inc. has announced that it has appointed Pete Hayes as chief sales officer (CSO). In this role, Hayes will directly lead the Global Accounts, Global Sales Operations, and Commercial Solutions organizations and will be responsible for driving coordinated sales execution across regional sales teams worldwide. He will also play an important role in driving the next phase of company growth in the rapidly-evolving data center industry.

“As a high-growth, global company, Equinix has an incredible opportunity to capitalize on the trends fueling the data center industry. As chief sales officer, I look forward to leading the global sales teams and helping customers scale to meet the opportunities of the growing digital economy,” said Hayes.

“Equinix is experiencing continued demand for premium data center services, in particular from customers who are deploying applications that require high performance, global reach, ecosystem access and mission critical reliability. Pete is a world-class sales and marketing executive with an impressive track record in building and developing high-impact organizations — we are thrilled to have Pete join Equinix and bring his talent to capturing the opportunity ahead of us,” said Charles Meyers, COO, Equinix.

Hayes was previously executive vice president, Commercial Sales and Support at Frontier Communications representing over 50 percent of the revenue of the company and generating over $2B in revenue. He was responsible for leading a team of more than 1,400 that included direct sales, business call center, sales engineering, sales support, and sales operations.

In 2005, Hayes was senior vice president, Sales, Marketing and Business Development at Frontier. In that role he developed 45 new products and started up three new business units, collectively generating incremental revenue of more than $500M. As a corporate officer and member of the seven-person senior leadership team Hayes was involved in all aspects of the business and interacted frequently with the board of directors.

Prior to his positions at Frontier Communications, Hayes spent nearly 15 years with Microsoft where he held a number of positions. Most recently Hayes was vice president, Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) where he led a $1.7B business with more than 700 sales, services, marketing, programs, government relations and technical staff across 53 Microsoft subsidiaries. He also developed Microsoft’s worldwide strategy for enterprise customers and created Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business growing it from a $133M Federal business to a complete Public Sector business with revenue of $1.3B. Prior to Microsoft, Hayes worked at IBM in various sales, technical and management roles.