Small and Medium Businesses Working with Partners Is Big

When it comes to running your business in an increasingly digital world, whether you’re a small regional retailer or a big box store, your challenges are pretty much the same. You need to expand and interconnect your digital infrastructure and secure your applications and workloads wherever they are (on-premises or in the cloud). Also, you need to continuously deliver the performance that your users demand and ensure business continuity, all while lowering costs.

The big difference between small and medium businesses (SMBs) and their larger counterparts is that they are challenged by fewer resources and technological expertise. However, the good news is that SMBs are agile and don’t have the overhead that can weigh down bigger companies, which need to navigate their digital transformation across multiple organizational silos. No matter the size, businesses that need to supplement their existing IT infrastructure and expand their digital services can quickly and easily harness the expertise of rich partner ecosystems worldwide on Platform Equinix®.

Keeping up with an ever-evolving digital market

The rate of digital transformation seems to be accelerating beyond the expertise of many SMBs, which don’t have a team of IT specialists on-hand and where most people are wearing multiple hats. The distributed nature of today’s digital businesses and the complicated hybrid multicloud architectures required to run them present SMBs with the perfect storm. They need to be competent on multiple digital platforms and stay competitive in the business services their customers require. Many SMBs find they cannot realistically do both well. Instead, they look for a partner or partners that can take care of the digital infrastructure so that they can do what they do best: run their business.

We see leading SMBs seeking assistance from partners to help them transform their IT infrastructures to be digital-first, with “turnkey” services in the following areas:

• Interconnection/networking
• Compute and storage
• Cloud access
• Edge security
• Business continuity/disaster recovery

The term “services” has some significance in that most businesses (large and small) do not want to add CAPEX; instead, they are looking for OPEX opportunities to build out their digital infrastructure capabilities. According to the Equinix 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey, over two-thirds (71%) of IT decision-makers across the globe say they are moving toward an “as a service” (XaaS) model, with more than half saying that an XaaS model simplifies their IT infrastructure. Also, the Global Interconnection Index (GXI), Volume 5 shows that enterprises are leveraging service provider marketplaces to optimize network and multicloud capabilities with adjacent dedicated data as they exit traditional core data centers in favor of XaaS OPEX models.

Focusing on compute and storage and networking/interconnection services, here are examples of how SMBs can harness the resources and expertise they need from some of the thousands of partners on Platform Equinix.

Partnerships in compute and storage services

Building out compute and storage services in edge metro markets at a moment’s notice was critical for many companies as they needed to meet the application access needs of a remote workforce during the global pandemic. However, the need for a more agile and flexible IT infrastructure that can be turned up or down on demand has not diminished. These capabilities continue to be a saving grace for many SMBs that need fast access to resources to grow their business.

Many of these pay-as-you-go services are more cost-effective alternatives to cloud services that can have escalating cloud egress charges when moving data and workloads. These fees can be a huge hit to an SMB’s bottom line.

Equinix Platform Partners and 2021 Partner Award winners HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform and Dell APEX Data Storage Services enable SMBs to maximize their compute and storage capabilities to support any application stack, while reducing costs using a more flexible, turnkey digital infrastructure environment. These solutions deliver the same security and cost-savings that private, on-premises IT infrastructure provides, without the CAPEX overhead or recurring cloud egress charges.

For example, a company can save millions of dollars in cloud egress charges by deploying an on-premises, cloud-adjacent compute and storage solution, along with fast and secure cloud interconnection. Our partnerships with HPE GreenLake and Dell APEX can also deliver high-performance, low-latency software-defined interconnection via Equinix Fabric™ to leading network and cloud service provider ecosystems to deploy hybrid multicloud architectures.

Partnerships in networking/interconnection services

With more than 2,000 network service providers (NSPs) on Platform Equinix, the choices to create high-performance, secure network backbones are unlimited. The rich NSP ecosystem on Platform Equinix has multiple turnkey SMB network services. For example, SMBs can modernize legacy network backbones with SD-WANs and virtual network functions devices from leading partners on Network Edge, interconnect hybrid multicloud architectures, and secure edge networks to protect a more distributed “risk plane.”

By solving for network performance and edge security via pay-as-you go network services, NSPs can help SMBs improve their application performance and reduce risk. Many of our Equinix 2021 Partner Award Winners are examples of the outstanding work that our NSP partners are doing with our global customers.

Our global platform of more than 240 Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers provides the geo-redundancy that many regional SMBs require for business continuity and disaster recovery. For example, reseller partner C3NTRO Telecom, a telecom carrier based in Mexico, interconnects its customers to leading cloud providers to run their workloads with the best possible performance, security and resiliency.

One large retail customer in Mexico needed to optimize network access to its cloud service providers (CSPs) and increase its application performance and resiliency. By working with Equinix and C3NTRO, the retailer was able to create a geo-redundant digital infrastructure in the Dallas and Ashburn Equinix IBX data centers, where it could access its CSPs with greater speed, built-in security and lower risk of failure. By going with the combined Equinix and C3NTRO solution, the retailer reduced network latency by ~50% and realized a 70% reduction in cloud egress charges.

Retailer’s high-performance, secure and resilient digital infrastructure on Platform Equinix with partner C3NTRO

SMBs can be bigger businesses

SMBs can realize their big business goals on Platform Equinix and gain access to a wide range of partners’ turnkey IT (on-premises and cloud) and interconnection solutions. This gives them a “one-stop-shop” for greater performance, security and resiliency with less cost and risk. Tools such as the enable customers, partners and resellers to discover, connect and promote their services to more than 9,500 active Marketplace members. And our Global Solutions Architects (GSAs) can help SMBs design solutions and identify partners to quickly build agile and scalable digital infrastructures.

As the world’s digital infrastructure company™, Equinix is the platform where SMBs can connect with the right partner to accelerate their digital transformation. Along with our global partners, we empower everyone from small startups to Fortune 500 companies to become digital-first leaders and build out a resilient digital infrastructure that can help future-proof their operations for greater business expansion and growth.

Learn more about Equinix partners and partner programs.