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Equinix looking for friends to fuel enterprise push

New Melbourne bit barn joins

Global bit barn operator Equinix has decided it wants more enterprise customers.

The company operates over 100 data centres around the world and, thanks to a carrier-agnostic stances, is happy to connect any kit it houses to any telco that cares to land a fibre in its data centres.

That position's worked well as an attractor for large-scale customers: Equinix can point to Amazon Web Services' Direct Connect and Microsoft's Azure ExpressRoute as clients, plus a who's who of large scale cloud operators. Indeed, the company's CEO Steve Smith today told The Reg that 80 per cent of revenue comes from customers who live in multiple Equinix sheds. Samuel Lee, the company's Asia-Pacific president, added that about 70 per cent of tenants in new data centres already work in another Equinix facility.

All of which leaves the company growing swiftly, but with a clientele skewed towards large scale players.

Enter the channel, which the company now feels is a fine thing to have as a reseller of interconnection services, not floor space.

The idea, Lee explained, is that consultancies and system integrators should be encouraged to cook up ideas for enterprise apps that can benefit from the kind of cloud-to-cloud connections that Equinix can deliver. The bit barn broker isn't interested in back office stuff, instead hoping that its nascent channel brings it ideas for customer-facing apps that need fat pipes to serve their intended audience, either to bring bits to browsers or to connect cloud-architected apps to other vaporous resources.

Equinix reckons it can pull this off in part because of its global reach, which stretched a little today with the opening of a new data centre in Melbourne, Australia.

The new bit barn is rich in symbolism, as it's located across the road from the city's working port. Meting rooms afford views of container loading equipment and when your correspondent visited a container ship passed by at a surprising clip.

The wedge-shaped edifice (depicted above) that Equinix has erected to hold 375 server cabinets (and a further 1,125 should the spirit move it) therefore offers a blindingly obvious juxtaposition of changes in the global economy. The less romantic may wish to instead contemplate the connections to 130 network partners to which one can connect from the LEED-credentialled, US$60m bit barn, which was built because customers kept asking for a place to put their servers in Australia's second city. ®

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