“The second trend is that we’re seeing many large enterprises fundamentally redesigning the distribution of their workloads between on site and cloud infrastructure, be it public, private or hybrid.”
According to Brian Lillie, chief information officer for Equinix, this is an interesting time to be in the market for cloud services. Never before has there been as many services offered by so many providers.
Cloud boon
“In particular, it’s a great time to be a CIO, and the cloud is the main reason why. You have so many solutions available to you, so many options and so many choices that it’s never been more fun. I think it’s a great time. At the same time, with so many different value-adds being offered out there, there is a risk that the essential core offerings can get confused.”
If you’re a global multinational company, then you definitely want to know that the firms you’re looking to partner with are in the countries you want to be in. That appears as a customer preference for a couple of reasons – one of them is application performance and the desire to bring the edge of the application or the edge of the cloud closer to your customers, Brian Lillie, Equinix
The contention is that with so much choice flooding the market, it can be hard for companies to know what represents real value and what does not.
“Whenever you have more choice, it’s harder to discern between the contenders and the pretenders. And when you’re talking about workloads that are shoring up a business or production cycle, you need to be cognisant, careful, strategic and choose the right partners. That’s really important,” he said.
One of the key assets that Equinix’s customers look for when shopping for cloud services, according to Lillie, is global presence.
“If you’re a global multinational company, then you definitely want to know that the firms you’re looking to partner with are in the countries you want to be in. That appears as a customer preference for a couple of reasons – one of them is application performance and the desire to bring the edge of the application or the edge of the cloud closer to your customers,” he said.
Sovereignty
“Alternatively, it could be because of data sovereignty concerns or because you’re building out an Internet of Things (IOT) application and you want to process the data collected by edge devices in real time. It depends on the application.”
Equinix recently acquired Telecity and, as a result, now has a total of four data centres in Dublin as well as many more around the world. This has allowed it to enter the Irish market, something that Lillie said has long been on the company’s to do list.
“We had a very strong franchise in Europe before the Telecity deal but there are two reasons why we wanted to be in Ireland specifically. One is that we have a number of multinational customers who asked us about Ireland and we had to say we didn’t have a presence. Location matters and now we can say we do have a presence here,” he said.
“The second reason is to help Ireland spring out into other parts of the world, not just in Europe but in the US and in Asia. We have about 150 data centres around the world in 21 countries and so we’re globally deployed. If you’re an Irish multinational and you want to globally expand, you have a partner that you can do that with.”
Experienced consumers
While not being a cloud services provider itself, Equinix uses around 50 different cloud providers in the course of operating its business. From this perspective, it is an extremely experienced consumer in its own right.
On the public cloud side of things, Ireland is growing very strongly at the moment and many large organisations are building out megascale data centres in Dublin and around the country. That is an excellent stimulus for business growth in the cloud area because it’s going to result in the cluster and magnet effect and that’s good for all of us in the data centre business. We expect things to continue to grow, Gary Keogh, Digital Realty
“We use them for everything from infrastructure as a service to software as a service and for some platform as a service as well. I think the fact that we can connect to them all either directly via a direct connect operating over the cloud exchange or over optimised internet makes a huge difference,” said Lillie.
“The fact that I can do that and have that sort of connectivity in multiple markets where the employees and customers that I’m trying to serve are is just a significant advantage. In addition, the notion of scaling is an important add on.”
Most enterprise chief information officers are not ready to put all their workloads in the cloud and so are really aiming toward building out hybrid cloud installations.
“I can have an on-premises cage with my gear in it that’s behind my firewall so it’s really on my premises but I can directly connect it to Amazon or Microsoft or Google and expand my on-premises infrastructure to off-premise,” said Lillie.
“We’ve done many, many tests and case studies either ourselves or with customers where they’ve done just that and they’ve been able to scale from their on-premises cage to off-premise in a very cost effective and robust way. That kind of elasticity is not only within the cloud, it’s also available across hybrid landscapes and I think it’s the sort of the architecture that everybody is really aspiring too because it’s the happy and frugal architecture, as we call it.”
Choice benefits
Digital Reality provides the kind of infrastructure used by public cloud providers to work with customers and according to Gary Keogh, the company’s sales director, growth in the sector and increased end user choice has been good for the company.
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