Feb 1 2010 5:03PM GMT

Mike Manos leaves Digital Realty Trust to go to Nokia

Mark Fontecchio Profile: Mark Fontecchio

Mike Manos, one of the more well-known and well-respected figures in the data center industry, is making another job change.

It was less than a year ago when Manos decided to leave Microsoft’s data center team, where he was the general manager of its data center services division. He decided to go to Digital Realty Trust to become a senior vice president there, summing up his decision in a post on his LooseBolts blog by saying:

In the end, my belief is that it will be companies like Digital Realty Trust at the spearhead of driving the design, physical technology application and requirements for the global Information Utility infrastructure. They will clearly be situated the closest to those changing requirements for the largest amount of affected groups. It is going to be a huge challenge. A challenge, I for one am extremely excited about and can’t wait to dig in and get started.

Manos wrote that in May. Now it’s January, and Manos is moving on, saying he “decided to leave the company to focus a bit more on some personal work/life balance issues.” We can only speculate what he means by the balance issues he refers to.

But then yesterday, Manos wrote another blog post saying he will be working for Nokia as their vice president of service operations. Manos describes the role in a new blog post:

In this role I will have global responsibility for the strategy, operation and run of infrastructure aspects for Nokia’s new cloud and mobile services platforms.

It appears Nokia is working to challenge big players like Google and Apple in the cloud computing space (whatever that means), and Manos will be a big part of building up Nokia to get there.