There’s been steady momentum behind Cloud Exchange since we introduced it globally a little over a year ago, and the recent addition of Alibaba’s cloud service, Aliyun, is the latest evidence that we may be on to something here.
Cloud Exchange‘s technology allows customers to directly connect to multiple clouds simultaneously from a single port. They can scale computing power up or down automatically, allowing them to access the exact cloud they need, when they need it. It’s cost effective, and with direct connections that bypass the public Internet, it’s also secure.
The Cloud Exchange is now in 21 markets, and all the major cloud providers are on board. The addition of Aliyun expands customer access to the North American and Asian markets, and makes it easier to build secure, high-performing public and hybrid cloud solutions.
The international press took note when we welcomed Alibaba to Cloud Exchange. Excerpts from some of the top coverage follows.
Bloomberg Business (live video interview with CEO Steve Smith):
Rishaad Salamat: The thing is, a company which is as big as Alibaba, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to be building their own data centers?
Steve Smith: Well, it’s a great question, and many of these large companies do build their own data centers. Typically, they do that, Rish, they do it on behalf of running their back office or their core applications that run the company. Then they use companies like Equinix when they distribute their access nodes or their network nodes around the world, where they don’t have to deploy capital in many of these markets, where companies like Equinix have data center capacity already there. And so we are partners to some of the largest companies in the world, helping them any time they want to distribute Internet infrastructure, to enable their customers, their employees, or support their revenue in those markets.
“Hardly a week goes by without the arms dealer to the cloud computing stars, Equinix, announcing some new partnership. It may not be a household name, but Equinix enables a surprising quantity of cloud vendors to perform. It also helps said cloud vendors attract enterprise customers by offering high speed interconnection points between the public cloud and private infrastructure. Equinix’s so-called Cloud Exchanges are a globally distributed series of points whereby enterprises can gain dedicated and highly performant connections to a number of vendors, Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure among them.
Equinix is building that base out today with the announcement of a partnership between it and Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing arm.”
“Chinese retail giant Alibaba is going bigger in cloud thanks to a new partnership with Equinix, which operates more than 105 data centers around the world The stated goal is to make it easier for multi-national corporations in the U.S. to conduct business in China and vice versa. Aliyun, is Alibaba’s cloud computing arm, just as Amazon Web Services is Amazon’s … cloud computing arm.”
“Equinix will start offering direct access to Aliyun’s cloud from its Silicon Valley and Hong Kong data centers in the near future. Asian tech companies favor Silicon Valley as a hub for accessing U.S. cloud services markets. Hong Kong is one of two main hubs in Asia international companies use to serve customers in the region and, importantly, in mainland China. The other one is Singapore. Aliyun recently announced it would establish its first U.S. cloud data center in Silicon Valley. Direct links from Equinix data centers in the region are likely to provide customers access to that facility.”
Read more about the Aliyun-Equinix partnership.
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