Equinix launches cloud market-place for data centre tenants

Grazed from IT Wire.  Author:  Stuart Corner.

Global date centre operator, Equinix, has launched an online marketplace to help tenants of its data centres find and connect with potential customers and suppliers of networking and cloud computing services.

"Today, the vibrant vertical ecosystems inside Equinix data centres include companies such as Bloomberg, Verizon, Syniverse, GoGrid, Abovenet, and more. These companies are already connecting and doing business with customers and partners that are also inside Equinix, and now the Equinix Marketplace makes it even easier to do so."

According to Darren Mann, managing director for Equinix Australia, relationships between tenants of the company’s data centres are already proliferating, simply on the basis of informal contacts between tenants. "In 2010 interconnections among our customers grew 27 percent [to some 90,000 connections], demonstrating the importance of locating Internet infrastructure in close proximity to your key ecosystem members. Now the Marketplace makes it even easier for our customers to connect and do business with one another," he said.

He told ExchangeDaily: "Over the years we have been successful at building up vertical markets in the cloud, content, enterprise, and finance sectors but it has pretty much been a case of manually matching up relationships as we have talked to customers. Marketplace will create a portal to further help these vertical markets turn in to ecosystems.

"It’s a way of adding value to the customers who are hosting with us and making a data centre more than just a place to put your boxes. We can use it as a selling tool to give potential customers a guest login so they can decide the value of a particular IBX [Internet Business Exchange] in a market they want to move into."

The company claims that ‘Platform Equinix’ – its network of data centres around the world – already hosts more than 700 cloud and IT service providers, 675 backbone and mobile networks, 450 online media, content and advertising destinations, and 600 electronic trading and financial market participants.

Equinix Marketplace "allows customers to create their own profiles in the form of a virtual storefront that incorporates many common social networking features," Equinix says. "Via these storefronts, cloud and networks providers, financial services companies and content and digital media providers can be found by and connect with partners that match their particular business needs."

Mann said: "Pretty much anybody that can sell a service within an IBX will, I think, want a storefront. And that storefront is totally managed by the customer. They get to decide what information they want to put in."

Yesterday, ahead of the launch, Equinix said it was expecting around 2,000 storefronts will be available at launch.