Equinix Fabric Ushers in Global Expansion to Canada

When you think of Canada, what immediately comes to mind for many are breath-taking landscapes, abundant natural resources and world-class ice hockey. However, what some may not realize is that Canada is home to a growing economy—ranked #10 by the World Population Review—with a $1.71 trillion GDP[i].

The Conference Board of Canada estimates that Canada’s economy will expand by 5.8% this year and 4.0% in 2022, thanks to the rollout of vaccines, which has led to a gradual reopening of the economy and boosted confidence.[ii] The business outlook for Canada is full of possibilities and Equinix is working to help bring Canada’s best to the world—while bringing Equinix’s best to Canada.

Equinix Canadian investment sets stage for new opportunities

With our $780 million Bell Canada acquisition last year, we significantly grew our Canadian footprint, gaining approximately 400,000 square feet of colocation space in eight key markets and more than 600 customers. And we continue to invest to bring us closer to our goal to extend Platform Equinix® and its portfolio of solutions to businesses across Canada. For example, we recently added Montréal as the second metro within Canada to offer Equinix Fabric^TM (Toronto was the first), enabling access to our globally interconnected digital and business ecosystems for our Quebec-based customers.

This is an important step in a multistage plan to roll out Equinix Fabric in another four strategic Canadian metros in 2021—Calgary, Kamloops, Vancouver and Winnipeg—bringing Equinix Fabric to a total of 56 strategic markets globally. Now, Canadian companies can interconnect with over 10,000 businesses on Equinix’s global platform of more than 220 IBX data centers in 63 metros across 26 countries on 5 continents.

How digital growth is impacting Canadian businesses

According to our latest Global Tech Trends Survey, nearly half (46%) of digital leaders in Canada have accelerated their digital transformation plans as a result of COVID-19, while 40% said their budgets have been increased to satisfy the rapid growth in digital demands.

However, building and connecting today’s digital infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex and costly. Successful IT infrastructure must span a mix of on-premises, cloud, edge, data center and managed services environments nationally and internationally. And it needs to connect multiple customers, partners and technologies seamlessly and reliably, along with increasing volumes of data and interconnected “things.”

Digital business is driving the need for greater network optimization. This means transforming your network architecture while distributing digital infrastructure in strategic locations to support local interconnection between users, IT services, data, clouds and ecosystem partners.

As the world’s digital infrastructure company, we’ll continue to make substantial investments to enable Canadian businesses and multinationals to create and interconnect digital infrastructure that will advance their competitive advantage in the global economy.

Equinix Fabric drives domestic and international benefits

Equinix Fabric is a software-defined interconnection service that allows any business to directly and securely connect its own distributed infrastructure with any other company’s infrastructure on Platform Equinix. Equinix Fabric is the core element knitting together our Canadian digital infrastructure backbone on Platform Equinix and interconnecting it to the global Equinix ecosystem of enterprises, service providers and partners. Equinix Fabric’s integration with both Network Edge virtual network services and the Equinix Metal™ automated bare metal solution enables you to create and interconnect foundational digital infrastructure where your business needs it. Equinix Fabric customers can lower their cloud connectivity and network traffic cost by 60% to 70% and reduce latency by a minimum of 30%.

For both enterprises and services providers, Equinix Fabric offers real interconnectivity advantages globally. With an integrated Equinix Fabric-based approach, you can dynamically and securely:

• Integrate physical and virtual infrastructure into distributed hybrid deployments, globally
• Leverage virtual network functions (VNF) devices such as SD-WAN gateways, cloud routers, firewalls on Network Edge to directly and securely connect to your choice of cloud service providers (CSPs)
• Interconnect to more than 10,000 businesses, including service providers (network, cloud, SaaS, content and digital media, collaboration, etc.), partners or customers at Equinix

Currently, Equinix Fabric supports approximately 31,100 customer connections—representing 29% year-over-year growth in this past year—creating more possibilities for companies around the world to meet and interconnect with each other.

Equinix Fabric: Powering the digital highway for Canadian interconnectivity

As Canada’s premier data center provider, Equinix’s expansion of Equinix Fabric nationally opens opportunities for multiple Canadian and multinational businesses from a local, domestic and international perspective.

For example:

• Our vendor-neutral platform enables access to a variety of regional and global telecommunications and network service providers (NSPs) thereby, providing greater choice, availability and value to their customers.
• Our new east and west Canadian IBXs provide an optimized cloud on-ramp access to all the major cloud and IT providers.
• Canada’s data governance laws and the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) make us a viable destination for EU businesses looking to establish a presence in North America.

Although new in Montreal, the power of Equinix Fabric is not new to businesses in Canada. For one Canadian telco operator, Equinix Fabric meant gaining nationwide access to Equinix’s interconnected ecosystem of partners and providers over high-speed, low-latency connections with unmatched reliability. A Canadian-headquartered insurer leveraged Equinix Fabric to seamlessly integrate its Canadian and U.S. operations, thus creating new opportunities to fully engage with international clients and enabling corporate-wide access to high-throughput interconnectivity.

For more about our ongoing investments in Canada, watch Andrew Eppich’s keynote video from the Great Canadian Data Centre Symposium 2020:

[i] World Population Review, “GDP Ranked  by Country 2021.”

[ii] Conference Board of Canada, “The Canadian Outlook,” April 28, 2021.