Now, more than ever, technology plays a fundamental role in powering the future of business. According to the latest release of Worldwide ICT Spending Guide Industry and Company Size, IDC forecasts Asia/Pacific* ICT Spending to grow by over 7.1%, to reach $950 billion in 2021 and expected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2025.[1] Due to the acceleration of digital journeys and the need for faster technology adoption by businesses in the region, demand has risen exponentially for more varieties of digital infrastructure offerings.
To meet these businesses’ needs, Equinix has recently launched several new edge services, namely Network Edge and Equinix Metal™. Combined with our existing portfolio of interconnection services, we are perpetuating our vision and providing our customers with more choices than ever.
Building a platform to power business success
As the world’s digital infrastructure companyTM, Equinix gives digital leaders a global platform to combine all the right places, partners and possibilities they need to succeed. We do so by recognizing that choice is fundamental: the choice in who you connect to, where you connect, and how you connect.
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At Equinix, the “who” speaks to our ecosystem, which is part of our DNA. From the early days of the internet, we have been growing it to provide our customers with a neutral place to connect to those they need to.
The “where” refers to our global footprint of data centers, which is the largest across the world. Wherever our customers are looking to deploy, they are likely to find a data center close to their chosen place of business.
As for the “how”, Equinix has been facilitating interconnection for over 20 years. In the past, our traditional colocation model involved selling space within our data centers and providing our customers with services to connect to other parties. Although the model still works, it offers relatively limited agility, considering the time it would take to procure, ship and configure all the necessary hardware.
These days, our customers are demanding for more. They want on-demand services that they pay based on consumption – the basis of our as-a-Service offerings, or more generally, the cloud. To keep up with their needs and the way of the market, we have had to transform our approaches to interconnection and make them more flexible to meet new demands over the years.
Leveraging IT agility to realize full value
To achieve cloud agility within the data center, one must first understand the services that customers typically deploy when they opt for the colocation model. Broadly, these services can be categorized into:
- Interconnection – connectivity to other participants in the ecosystem
- Compute and storage – for application hosting and data storage
- Networking functions – for switching, routing, firewalls and SDWAN
To deliver these functionalities as-a-Service and on-demand, where our customers only pay for what they use, we offer 3 core services––Equinix Fabric™, Equinix Metal and Network Edge––to help them realize Infrastructure as a Service with Equinix.
Drawing on its heritage in cloud exchange, Equinix Fabric has evolved over the years to have its capabilities extended to connect customers to other ecosystems globally, on-demand and in real time. As Equinix’s vision for the future of interconnection and the foundation for how our digital infrastructure services connect, Equinix Fabric comes integrated with Equinix Metal and Network Edge out of the box.
To put it simply, Equinix Metal is an automated bare metal infrastructure being retrofitted into our core metros worldwide. With Equinix Metal, customers can leverage single-tenanted compute to deploy applications anywhere in a matter of minutes. Together with our recent integration of PureStorage into the Equinix Metal offering, it covers the compute and storage aspects of deployment, all with the look and feel of the cloud.
Network Edge, our Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVi), allows customers to deploy the functionalities they need without any physical hardware. Integrated into Equinix Fabric™, it addresses the networking requirements that our customers typically have within an Equinix facility, namely, routing, switching, firewalls and SDWAN.
Working with Equinix to fast track your journey
Equinix’s interconnection and edge services may be all about flexibility, agility and scale, but being a digital infrastructure company is all about choice.
Businesses looking to manage their own hardware and connectivity can opt for our more traditional colocation services, whereas those that want to be able to consume everything as-a-service without having to step foot in a data center ever again can benefit from our interconnection and edge services. Those with the capabilities to manage infrastructure locally but do not have the hands and feet on the ground in other regions to do so, or those wanting to test a new market can go for a combination of these services.
At the end of the day, our customers can choose the components they need, wherever they need them, to achieve their goals. By offering them the choice, we can enable them to focus on what truly matters as they become their very own version of a digital infrastructure company.
[1] IDC Worldwide ICT Spending Guide Industry and Company Size (June, V2 2021)
*Note: Asia/Pacific excluding Japan
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