The ongoing economic struggles in Brazil are grabbing headlines, but they are far from the whole story in a country of more than 200 million with a rich history and major promise as an interconnection leader and innovator in Latin America.
Brazil has the world’s ninth-largest economy and it’s fourth-largest IT market. Projected internet and data traffic growth there shows the business opportunity in Brazil is real, expanding and enduring enough to outlast today’s news cycles.
Just this month, Equinix doubled our capacity in Brazil by opening SP3, our largest facility in Latin America. It’s also our third data center in São Paulo, to go along with two facilities in Rio de Janeiro.
Our investment in Brazil is significant, but it’s safe to say our growth story in Brazil isn’t near over. This is a country with a critical role to play as Equinix seeks to expand interconnection in Latin America, and globally.
A story of growth
Equinix’s history in Latin America began when we bought a stake in the Brazilian data center company ALOG in 2011. Today, the country remains at the center of our plans for regional growth, and the need for interconnection there is strong and growing.
Consider these projections about Brazil from the Cisco Visual Networking Index, for the years 2015-2020:
- The percentage of the population that uses the Internet will grow from 47% to 65%.
- The number of devices and connections per capita will rise from 2.5 to 3.6.
- The average data traffic per capita, per month, will increase from 8.3 gigabytes (GB) to 20.3 GB.
Brazil is also the main driver of a Latin American cloud computing market that the market research firm Technavio estimates will expand at compound annual growth rate of 29% between 2016 and 2020.
These projections feed optimism about the Brazilian market, but so does our actual experience there. Equinix São Paulo data centers have grown into a business hub for approximately 1,000 companies, including 270 cloud and IT services providers and more than 70 telecommunications carriers. Customers in Sao Paulo can also set up direct links to new submarine cable systems, including systems that link Brazil and the U.S.
It all makes Equinix São Paulo the most interconnected group of data centers in Brazil and a prime gateway into and out of the region.
Strengthening a global platform
Our data centers in Brazil are part of a global interconnection platform, Platform Equinix™, that spans 150 data centers in 41 markets. That global reach is important because it’s one of the key ways we enable a premier level of interconnection, out to the “digital edge,” that companies need in the digital age.
The digital edge is where the virtual world and physical worlds meet. It’s where users and data engage digital ecosystems – for things like business purchases, cloud-based analytics, and any number of transactions. Organizations need to be at the digital edge to deliver the secure, high-performing connectivity that’s necessary to compete. Traditional, centralized IT systems can’t do this. They’re too far from the digital edge, and that distance creates latency. But at Equinix, we’ve designed an edge strategy called an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA™) that shortens the distance and enables a new level of interconnection.
An IOA strategy transforms a company’s IT from siloed and centralized to distributed and dynamic. It brings IT closer to people, locations, clouds and data, for superior connectivity at the edge. And since the digital edge can be anywhere in our interconnected world, Equinix needs to be able to bring our customers anywhere. Strengthening our presence in Brazil is essential to that, so our customers can tap into the promise of Latin America. And increasing our reach into Latin America is also critical to serving our customers on all corners of our global platform as they look to implement an IOA.
Get a step-by-step guide on how to deploy an IOA by downloading our IOA playbook.
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