Equinix Targets the Cloud for Future Data Center Growth

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Equinix is one of the world’s leading data center and interconnection providers and is now aiming to be a leading vendor in the cloud space. Equinix’s new cloud initiatives were revealed during the company’s first quarter fiscal 2014 earnings call on April 30.

For the quarter, Equinix reported revenue of $580 million for a 12 percent year-over-year gain. Looking forward, Equinix provided second quarter fiscal 2014 guidance for revenues to range between $594 and $598 million.

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“Cloud adoptions continues to ramp, creating massive disruptions in how businesses consume IT services and creating significant opportunity for Equinix,” Stephen Smith, CEO and President of Equinix said during his company’s earnings call. “We’re experiencing a dramatic increase in traffic within the data center as enterprises leverage virtualized infrastructures and move data and applications into hybrid cloud architectures.”

Smith noted that Equinix is also adopting a cloud architecture for its own operations. He noted that Equinix has deployed a cloud optimized architecture globally to support the Equinix enterprise by connecting to over 40 cloud services. Now Equinix is looking to extend its reach and market position with the new Equinix Cloud Exchange.

“With Cloud Exchange, Equinix is building upon its interconnection heritage to bring together cloud providers and cloud consumers in a new way to realize the benefits of cloud computing,” Smith said. “With this solution enterprises can access multiple cloud and network vendors through a single port interface, allowing them to quickly and efficiently deploy hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

Smith explained that the Cloud Exchange is all about providing enterprises with a way to automatically, virtually provision workloads to the cloud. The service is accessible via an online portal that lists the available cloud service providers, which include Micosoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Equinix is making the Cloud Exchange available in 13 countries today and expects to have 19 countries online by the end of 2014.

“This removes many of the complexities and capacity limitations associated with setting up network connections to cloud services and enables enterprise customers to take full advantage of the cloud,” Smith said. “We believe our position as the world’s leading interconnection company underpinned by our strong ecosystem of 975 networks, 450 cloud service providers across more than 100 IBXs makes us uniquely qualified to be the home of the interconnected cloud.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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