With our acquisition of the Dallas Infomart now complete, it seems like a great time to reflect on its importance to our interconnection platform and the regional expansion that’s never really stopped since we first entered this interconnection hub nearly two decades ago.
I am incredibly excited about the important new customers and hundreds of thousands of square feet of colocation space the Infomart adds in Dallas. This is a metro with historic geographic appeal to Equinix customers, given its location at the midpoint between the U.S. east and west coasts.
But the purchase also complements recent acquisitions aimed at increasing and fortifying interconnection in Latin America. With the Infomart now part of the Equinix global footprint, our long-running commitment to Dallas is entering a new chapter with exciting implications for our future in the Americas during the global shift to digital.
Growth behind, growth ahead
Equinix built our first Dallas data center in 2000, drawn by the metro’s reputation as a technology center and a location roughly 1,400 miles between both New York and Silicon Valley. It was just the fourth data center in our entire company, which now operates 190+ facilities worldwide.
As a company with a long-time presence in Dallas, we’re well aware of the value of the Infomart. We’ve been a tenant there for years, and now that Equinix will operate the entire facility, its value to our customers will only increase.
For our current customers, a clear benefit is more space for physical expansion. Interconnection will be easier, as well. There’s no more need to deal with multiple parties or the building meet-me-rooms on site. Partners will be just a simple cross connect away.
Brand-new Equinix customers inside the Infomart will also see several clear advantages. They’ll get easy access to Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric), which enables customers to directly connect to onramps to major providers such as AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud. They’ll also get access to our Dallas Internet Exchange, where they can peer with more than 100 networks and content providers-lowering network cost and improving network performance.
The Infomart acquisition means every one of our customers will be able to grow with Equinix in Dallas, confident that the industry ecosystems they rely on will always be a cross connect away. The Infomart allows us to enable Dallas as a rich campus environment, where we’ll be ready to meet our customers’ diverse interconnection and colocation needs well into the future.
As we re-brand the Infomart as an Equinix facility, we see it becoming not just one of the most important interconnection facilities in the U.S., but in all of the Americas.
An expanding opportunity in Latin America
Economies are modernizing throughout Latin America, with accelerating broadband penetration in Brazil just one sign of that. Meanwhile, regional consumer habits are changing: People are increasingly viewing content on mobile devices. Satisfying business demands and consumer expectations is going to require greater interconnection-private data exchange between businesses.
Interconnection brings people, locations, cloud and data closer together for the secure, high-performance connectivity required by digital business. The Global Interconnection Index, a market study published by Equinix, predicts that Latin America will be the fastest-growing global region for Interconnection Bandwidth, a measure of the capacity to deliver interconnection. All this presents opportunity for companies in Dallas.
Dallas is historically a major gateway to Latin America, serving Mexico as well as Central and South America. The Infomart acquisition combines with our existing operations in Bogotá, Los Angeles, Miami, Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo to give us a more robust Latin American footprint of network and content providers looking to grow in the region. It bolsters business opportunities for managed services and cloud services providers, which have high usage rates by Latin American enterprises. And it increases access to important Latin American financial ecosystems, including those built around the Brazilian and Mexican stock exchanges.
The Infomart purchase is also well-aligned with our 2017 acquisition of the Miami NAP of the Americas (NOTA) facility. NOTA is the fourth-largest internet exchange point in the U.S. and a major hub for traffic between the U.S. and major Latin America markets via subsea cable. As businesses transform into digital businesses, the NOTA and Infomart facilities will combine to offer them new possibilities for interconnection and collaboration.
Our history in Dallas is long, but there’s clearly plenty of room for growth. Interconnection-first approaches to IT, such as an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA™) strategy, are becoming essential to digital business. The Infomart acquisition gives our customers more options for adopting an IOA strategy in an historic metro where opportunity just keeps expanding. Read more about how our global interconnection platform, Platform Equinix®, helps digital businesses implement an IOA strategy in Dallas and around the world.
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