On this episode of the Let’s Talk podcast, Alexander Kucherenko talks with Juan Aguirre, Chief Commercial Officer of Ilkari, about his path to the data centre and domain industry.
Listen now on Spotify:
Juan is a Frenchman with a Spanish name living in Switzerland. He came into the tech industry through the IPTV revolution, but before he started his tech career, he was a beekeeper in his student days to earn money for an amp for his electric guitar. He got the amp but never quite mastered the electric guitar, much to the joy of the neighbourhood.
Juan passionately discusses the domain business and its value to a company’s brand. He equates the cost of domains as a line item on an Excel sheet versus the cost for cloud infrastructure, one you notice and one you don’t.
He says that when he first started in the tech industry, people didn’t take domains seriously because they weren’t an expensive line item, and yet they are the foundation of a brand’s online presence.
However, after years in the domain industry, he saw that there was an inherent level of risk, and to be successful online, companies needed to shut down that risk as much as they could.
As brand value grows, domain value grows. Juan talks with Alexander about the increase of malicious actors in the domain industry, saying they are waiting to take advantage of a brand and its traffic.
His tip for reducing domain risk is to defend the domain at the start with a dedicated domain point person who can look after it. Once you assign a dedicated person to a domain, the value of the domain begins to increase for the organization.
“You take notice of what is expensive, and domains are rarely the number one cost at most companies, except affiliate publishers, which take very good care of their domains,” said Aguirre.
Domains are getting more complex
Because of the nature of the internet, domains are getting more complex. Every time Google changes something, a malicious actor comes on the market, and a shift in what works doesn’t work. Aguirre says COVID was a wake-up call for the domain industry—a shock. Other shocks include regulatory and tech shocks, and internet owners like Google and Microsoft are changing how they do business.
Some tips to reduce your domain risk
1. Be prepared.
Before you react to a shock, where does the domain sit, and who looks after it? How regularly do they review it? Find a home for your domain within the company, and when and if a shock happens, you can mitigate risk better.
2. You can weather the storm if you get the basics right.
Defend your domain, take up adjacent domains, determine what works in adjacent territories, manage typos, and determine if this can be tied to trademarks. How do you manage typos? Hold your privacy. Everything is open. The amount of information you can find about a company is enormous—if you go down the open intelligence route, you can find heaps and heaps about a person and company.
Juan strives to understand his customers’ business, saying it always comes down to people (not robots). The Ilkari brand brings together sovereignty technology—domains, a modern, certified data centre, co-location, and a private cloud—with different companies at different stages of development using their tools to achieve more transparency and control.
