As a tech writer working mostly incognito on behalf a range of companies, I can identify myself much less often than I could when working as a journalist. Ghost writers under NDAs don’t have bylines.

Two recent projects, however, bear my name. In one case, I wrote a position paper about advanced data centers. In another, I co-authored an article about the Internet of Things (IoT) for a specialized trade journal. (See “IoT and Elevators,” p. 166.) Both projects allowed me to do some of what I like best: connecting the dots between trends, markets and solutions.

Data centers have become a touchstone for technology used today in nearly every industry. The trend was well underway 15-plus years ago, when I was covering the cable industry full-time. What was once a headend – originally a community antenna television (CATV) receiver sited on a hilltop – was already morphing into the location-agnostic, telco-style data center that it has become, as video continues its migration into an IP delivery framework.

Today’s Web-scale companies look at markets in global or continental terms. For third-party data centers, especially those positioning themselves within a day’s drive of their customers, large regional markets remain relevant. In the position paper, simple division on regional square footage and total number of data centers led me to identify data centers in the NY/NJ market as being much smaller on average than counterparts elsewhere. Size then became a proxy for older and less advanced facilities.

In the second article, one of my ahah moments came when listening to a U.S. government cybersecurity building control-systems workshop. Commercial and government real estate differ, but the Pentagon executive on this panel, who had responsibility for thousands of properties around the world, was proposing a solution that could apply across the board.

These are the kinds of connections I draw for companies on a regular basis. They don’t necessarily require higher math or sophisticated tools. The Internet equivalent of shoe-leather (for persistence) and pencils (to connect the dots) can take you pretty far.