Equinix prepares for ‘second wave’ of data centre and cloud computing
Fri 4 Aug 2017
Equinix looks set to be moving onto the ‘second wave’ of data centre and cloud computing as the rush to build data centres slows and moves towards service and business transformation.
In order to address this paradigm shift, the global colocation data centre company has created a new department, the Strategy, Services and Innovation (SSI) unit.
The new strategic unit will be led by Charles Myers, who has been with the company since 2010 and has been Chief Operating Officer since 2013. The aim is to look forward and concentrate on possible future requirements of customers in order to push into a new growth phase.
This means that Meyers will move from the core operations of the business to trying to keep up with the demands of what Equinix calls an increasingly ‘cloud-first’ world. As well as this, in his new position as President of SSI, Myers will need to identify key growth areas for the business and create long term strategies.
Equinix CEO Steve Smith said: “As Equinix becomes an increasingly important and strategic partner to businesses that are realigning their organizations to benefit from the shift to digital, the addition of the new role of President of Strategy, Services and Innovation will enable Equinix to prioritize the current and future needs of our customers.”
In a conference call with analysts, Smith argued that the second wave of data centre technology is beginning. He said: “We’ve lived with six years or seven years of a wave — we call it kind of the first wave in cloud — and we think there’s another wave coming.” He predicts that having learned a number of lessons from the first wave, there will be a lot of changes.
Although not made explicit in terms of its strategy, Smith hinted that Equinix will focus on edge computing and IoT devices, necessitating a larger distribution of data centres in order to be geographically close to the devices that it’s providing data for.
It’s not yet known how Equinix plans to deliver this, but it seems likely based on what Smith spoke about in the conference call that this will affect the way it chooses data centre locations – so that they are either close enough to populated areas to host edge computing nodes, or to be able to aggregate that data.
This may also mean it’s likely to move into new geographies – for instance, the APAC region, or further expansion into South American countries.
