Equinix completes the first stage of their strategy to extend customers’ digital transformation with full ECX Fabric connectivity between regions, which also allows their customers to connect with any other customer in the world.
Bill Long, Equinix’s Vice President of Interconnection Services
Interconnect and data centre provider Equinix has announced the completion of the phase of their Platform Equinix that is designed to provide full global connectivity options through their Equinix Cloud Exchange [ECX] Fabric. The ECX Fabric now supports connections between all 37 ECX markets, as well as direct connections between any of the 1400 customers in those markets.
Equinix’s core interconnect value has always been providing a superior grade of service than companies can obtain from the public Internet. It developed the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric in late 2017, to further extend their Equinix Cloud Exchange platform, by facilitating direct physical and virtual connection of their data centres. This new announcement extends that further, by connecting all the regions together. This lets customers connect to clouds in other regions, and directly enables customers, for the first time, to establish on-demand network connections between the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
“Over the last year, we have built out – and are now announcing – the completion of this global rollout,” said Bill Long, Equinix’s Vice President of Interconnection Services. “This allows full global connection to all of our markets, as well as to all other customers who are also on the Cloud Exchange – 1400 of them. Any of our customers can now reach all of our other customers anywhere in the world.”
This ability to allow Equinix customers to work directly with existing and potential new partners through the ECX Fabric means that this stage of Equinix’s strategy has essentially been accomplished.
“It’s the completion of this part of our vision,” Long said. “Everything is now fully rolled out. Whenever we roll out a new centre, it will come with the full fabric connections as well.
Long emphasized that while this kind of connectivity could have been achieved previously, the process was much more complex, time-consuming and expensive.
“Historically, if you wanted to reach a cloud provider in say, Tokyo, you could go to a service provider like NTT who could provide that service,” he said. “It would take a couple of weeks to get the order done, and then the network provider would have to provision that service, which would take anywhere between 30 and 120 days. You would then have to sign a contract with the provider, which would lock you in for one to three years. We have taken that whole process and reduced it to a minute.”
Long cited the example of Brazilian new agency Agência Estado, one of their referenceable customers for this.
“They wanted to connect their infrastructure deployments in São Paulo with those in New York,” Long said. “By using this, it was up in 30 seconds.” It also has about 20 per cent lower latency than the legacy telecom link that they used before.”
Another customer, transportation booking services provider Easybook, used this service to facilitate expansion into new regions.
“Easybook was looking to expand into Asia, and this enabled them to reach cloud providers in other regions,” Long noted.
While this completes the integration of global connectivity, Long said that this is just the first stage of a longer-term plan to facilitate customers’ digital transformation strategies.
“We are systematically looking at what companies need to do to deploy a hybrid multi-cloud architecture,” he stated. “Full connectivity was the hard thing for them. This is the first thing in a roadmap vision, in which we will take away all the friction points. We do have some additional things in the hopper.”
Equinix originally began with a direct go-to-market model, but they have built a channel component in as they have expanded, and the channel has become an important part of their Canadian go-to-market, particularly since they opened a Toronto TR 2 centre in 2015, making a $100 million investment.
“We are trying to remove friction points for hybrid cloud adoption,” Long said. “This extension of connectivity will make it easier for resellers of vendors like Cisco and Juniper to get it all set up much faster. And for our direct channel resellers, its another great product they have to sell.”
