THE CHALLENGE OF GROWING
INTERVIEW
This will mean Equinix has operations in 48 cities across 24 countries .
The acquisition is a strategic move to better serve customers requiring access to the Spanish and Portuguese markets . As Schwartz explains , Equinix ’ s closest locations for these clients had previously been France , Switzerland and Italy , and the company requires local services , whether digital media companies or cloud providers . “ For us , it expands the potential and we see a big opportunity in going to our customer bases around the world and offering them the opportunity to extend their deployments with us into Spain and Portugal ,” he explains . Another key element of this expansion is developing submarine cable systems to grow traffic between Europe , Latin America and Africa . There are already connections in place , such as the African Coast to Europe ( ACE ) route that links to Itconic ’ s Lisbon data centre , but , for example , with Equinix ’ s existing presence in Sao Paulo and Rio , it will be able to establish a cable running from Brazil all the way to Portugal . Subsea cables are becoming essential to the industry . In the last few years , major internet players like
Google , Facebook and Microsoft have been investing substantially in their construction due to the need for fast , efficient connectivity to all their sites around the world .
Over 400 new customers from very diverse industries will be served by Equinix as a result of the acquisition , including L ’ Oréal , Repsol , Real Madrid and Bank of America . Its customer base has always been varied , while at the same time it has always had a keen eye on targeting particular sectors like telecoms providers , internet e-commerce players , financial services and electronic trading .
“ We ’ ve always had customers ranging from Walmart to General Electric using us to integrate their IT infrastructure ,” says Schwartz . “ With the growth of cloud computing , we ’ re seeing more and more of that , where the large corporate is our fastest growing segment .”
THE CHALLENGE OF GROWING
Schwartz explains that one of the challenges involved in an acquisition of this scale is ensuring Equinix delivers the services its customers require .
However , with the organisation ’ s worldwide expansion over the
12 November 2017