Equinix makes inroads in Oz market

Equinix is staking its ground in the Asia-Pacific data centre market, announcing three new customers in Australia and a new range of data centre services.

US provider of network-neutral collocation and Internet exchange services, Equinix first gained a foothold in the Australian and Asian markets in December with its acquisition of the data services companies Pihana Pacific and i-STT.

Since completing the acquisitions - that provided Equinix with data centres in Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo - the Internet exchange services company has focused on signing up new customers in the region and rolling out new services offerings to the Asia-Pacific market.

Equinix launched a new suite of managed IT infrastructure services in Australia last week. It was made up of managed security, monitoring and multi-homing services.

“They are value-added services for our data centre customers,” Equinix Australia managing director, Doug Oates, said.

The company also recently launched its GigE Exchange service in Australia and Japan.

The service, that has been available in the US for some time, facilitates ISP and content peering amongst Equinix customers via a gigabit Ethernet central switching fabric.

It represents cost savings for ISPs establishing peering connections in multiple locations by eliminating intermediate network backbones.

Equinix has signed up eight new local enterprise customers since acquiring Pihana Pacific and its 30-strong Australian customer base. The most recent were Electronic Arts, Hostworks and Aegis Equities Research.

Oates could not disclose the current occupancy rate of its Sydney data centre, however, he said the overall occupancy of Equinix’s 15 data centres was 30 per cent.

Oates, a former director of Pihana Pacific, agreed that increasing consolidation in the data centre market was a necessary evil.

“Two years ago there was an oversupply of data centres, but what we’re seeing now is a lot of these companies returning to their core businesses which do not primarily focus on data services," he said.

“There is a very high capital outlay when setting up a data centre business and return on investment can be slow in this market, so to survive in this business you need to be in a very strong financial position.”

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