This expansion builds on the significant global growth Equinix experienced in 2015 in which the company organically grew its footprint with the addition of five new data centers in key economic centers including New York, London, Singapore, Melbourne and Toronto. Since then the company has made two significant acquisitions – Bit-isle in Japan (for $275M) in November 2015 and Telecity Group in EMEA (for $3.8B) which was completed in January 2016. As a result, Equinix has added seven new markets to increase the scale and reach of its data center platform. By providing additional capacity in the coming year, Equinix continues to play a central role in advancing the digital economy’s interconnected era, in which businesses are demanding increasing levels of interconnection to accelerate business performance.
An expanding global interconnection platform
· In the coming weeks and months Equinix will bring four new data centers online on four continents, adding over 4,000 new cabinets of capacity. These sites will add nearly 200,000 square feet of new data center space at full build. This brings Equinix’s total global footprint to 14 million square feet, increasing the scale of Platform Equinix™ by more than 27 percent year-over-year.
o Tokyo – Equinix's state-of-the-art Tokyo data center, TY5, will be in close proximity to TY3, near Tokyo's financial district. Together, these two IBX data centers will further strengthen Equinix's financial services ecosystem and offer a full range of premium colocation, interconnection and support services to the greater Tokyo area which is the most populous metropolitan area in the world.
o Dallas – The Dallas-Fort Worth region has long been a major Internet and peering exchange point for the southern U.S., as well as a major communications hub between North and South America. Equinix's DA7 data center will support global enterprises that require high power density, as well as connectivity to leading NSPs and CSPs in this increasingly strategic market.
o S?o Paulo – Equinix’s new SP3 data center will address increasing demand for colocation in the State of S?o Paulo, as Equinix’s SP2 facility in Tambor? is nearing capacity. SP3 will double the company's capacity in Brazil, as more businesses outsource IT and leverage the cloud.
o Sydney – The new SY4 data center will enable Equinix’s Australian customers to continue to take advantage of IT innovations including hybrid cloud architectures and help Australian customers safeguard their mission-critical data. Additionally, SY4 will be located near the central business district with access to Southern Cross Cable Head, providing extensive network interconnection in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
· As global data centers continue to drive consumption of the cloud, Equinix data centers in these four markets will provide access to the Equinix Cloud Exchange™. Available in 21 markets globally, Cloud Exchange provides access to private, direct connections to many of the leading cloud service providers including: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Office 365, Google Cloud Platform, SoftLayer, and Oracle Cloud (availability may vary by market).
Growth supports ITs move to the edge
· According to IDC’s White Paper entitled “3rd Platform-Enabled Digital Transformation Strategies Require Interconnection-Oriented Architecture”, the research firm notes that in the 3rd Platform era of technology-driven business innovation, enterprises must leverage cloud, mobility, big data/analytics, and social networking to enable new ways of maintaining and extending their own business relevance. To do so, enterprises need to create and deliver business value at a faster and greater scale, uncovering new sources of business revenue growth, driving operational improvements, and engaging customers in a new, more personalized manner. In this 3rd Platform era of digital transformation, mission-critical business processes, applications, and supply chains are moving to the edge. · To optimize the experience, IDC recognizes that the interconnected enterprise is one in which the "network edge" has been defined as an architecture that federates highly dispersed and shifting groups of internal and external users (employees, customers, partners, and suppliers) to dispersed (and multi-sourced) IT systems, applications, and data stores to run business processes, deliver content and business information (systems of record, engagement, insight, and action), and improve customer engagement, employee productivity, and overall business efficiency.
· Equinix has observed a critical business requirement driving demand for interconnection capacity – the need to interconnect people, locations, clouds and data. Interconnection is essential to deliver a rich, ubiquitous user experience with the agility and actionable insight to enable new business models and enhanced productivity.
· To address these business needs companies will need to forge business advantage by collaborating in communities with other enterprises via secure, reliable and instant connections. In anticipation, global enterprises such as Alibaba.com, Wal-Mart, Netflix, and PayPal, are building out their IT infrastructures for maximum connectivity and global scale leveraging Equinix’s data centers which now scale to 40 markets throughout the world. With more than 170,000 interconnections already established among its customers, Equinix offers the world's leading global interconnection platform – Platform Equinix.
