Picture Courtesy: Eurocloud.org
Equnix, global leader in the datacenter space with more than 90 data centers all over the world, today announced a global marketplace for their Platform Equinix customers. Platform Equinix is their data center platform tapping into their vast array of data centers from many different geographical locations targeting everyone from SMBs to enterprises. Platform Equinix is home to ecosystems containing thousands of digital-driven enterprises including more than 700 cloud and IT service providers, 675 high-performance backbone and mobile networks, 450 online media, content and advertising destinations, and 600 electronic trading and financial market participants. With this move, they are enabling their customers to transact not only with each other but also with other customers with their compute facilities elsewhere. Equinix customers can sell anything from network bandwidth to storage to compute to SaaS to content. It is a general purpose trading platform for their customers.
Even though Equinix has built this marketplace for their customers, it can be extended in the future to be a global marketplace irrespective of whether you are a Equinix customer or not. From what I understood from their briefing, they are building a general purpose marketplace but starting initially with a narrow focus of letting their own customers sell “resources” through it. I will say this is a smart move on the part of Equinix and, with Equnix being one of the large providers of data centers, this has a potential to put them at the center of the federated cloud ecosystem I am advocating in this blog and elsewhere.
The marketplace idea in the context of federated cloud ecosystem is nothing new. Zimory tried to do it long before many in the industry became aware of this cloud thing. Spotcloud brought this idea to the conscience of pundits and other industry folks, Scaleup Technologies built a platform for marketplaces and ComputeNext appears to be trying to come out with a service for search and discovery of resources. But what is interesting with Equinix is that they have built a general purpose platform that can go beyond selling just raw compute resources and add value at a layer much above the infrastructure. If you combine this with the enormous klout clout they have in the data center market segment, they have the potential to do something big. Even though SpotCloud and ComputeNext target audience beyond Equinix data centers, it will be interesting to see how they respond to this announcement.
I am bullish on the future of cloud to be more federated than pundits in the industry want to believe and when we have such federated cloud ecosystems, marketplaces are the next critical element in the puzzle. Equinix, potentially an important player in such a scenario, building a marketplace platform augurs well for federated clouds. I will definitely try to get in touch with them in either 6 months or a year to see how the marketplace is shaping up.
Disclosure: I was an expert panelist in the online Round Table conducted by GigaOm Pro in coordination with Equinix
Related articles
- Equinix Marketplace Seeks to Connect Customers (datacenterknowledge.com)
- Equinix launches data center marketplace (venturebeat.com)
- Equinix Creates Market for Data Center Clients to Trade Services (pcworld.com)
- Equinix creates market for data center clients to trade services (infoworld.com)
- Equinix business exchange plays proximity card [GigaOM] (gigaom.com)
