- Equinix, a global interconnection and data center company, announced recently it is buying Packet. These are the details about the deal.
Equinix, a global interconnection and data center company, announced recently that it signed a definitive agreement to buy Packet — which is a leading bare metal automation platform. This acquisition will accelerate Equinix’s strategy in helping enterprises more seamlessly deploy hybrid multi-cloud architectures on Platform Equinix and extract greater value from the platform’s rich ecosystems and global interconnection fabric. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2020.
“We started Packet in 2014 with a vision to redefine the next wave of cloud with a focus on the distribution and automation of fundamental infrastructure. This dovetails perfectly with Equinix’s strategy for helping enterprises implement new digital architectures in a growing number of edge locations. The incorporation of Packet into Equinix will accelerate the delivery of enhanced edge services to Equinix’s growing customer base while continuing to serve the developer community that has come to rely on Packet’s unique offering,” said Packet co-founder and CEO Zachary Smith.
And by utilizing bare metal services at Equinix to deploy digital infrastructure on-demand, customers will be better equipped to reach everywhere, interconnect everyone, and integrate everything that matters to their business. Equinix plans to utilize the Packet offering to accelerate the development and delivery of its interconnected edge services. And by combining Packet’s innovative and developer-oriented bare metal service offering with Equinix’s interconnection capabilities and organic bare metal efforts, Equinix is intending to create an enterprise-grade bare metal offering across Platform Equinix that allows customers to rapidly deploy digital infrastructure within minutes at a global scale.
“By acquiring Packet we are making it easier for enterprises to seamlessly deploy multi-cloud solutions at Equinix and extract greater value from our rich ecosystems and global interconnection platform. Packet’s innovative and agile bare metal service, and neutral approach to software stacks, fit our own cloud-neutral model and match our strategy for helping enterprises flexibly deploy digital infrastructure, within minutes, at global scale. Our combined strengths will further empower companies to be everywhere they need to be, to interconnect everyone and integrate everything that matters to their business,” added Equinix chief product officer Sara Baack.
As the pace of digital transformation is creating a seismic shift in the enterprise today, businesses are embracing hybrid multicloud and edge architectures as the modern digital infrastructure of choice. And Platform Equinix is a dynamic data center and interconnection platform essential for any enterprise deploying hybrid multicloud at the edge. With a global footprint of over 200 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers, Platform Equinix contains the highest share of the world’s public cloud on-ramps and the most physically and virtually interconnected ecosystems in the world.
“We believe in customer choice and strongly support customers selecting the right computing environment that meet their enterprise needs. The addition of Packet bare metal will enable Equinix to deliver even more customer choice, accelerating their digital transformations while connecting workloads seamlessly from on-prem to cloud using technologies such as Google Anthos,” explained Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of the global ecosystem at Google Cloud.
Bare metal is considered a key foundational element allowing customers to deploy distributed hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure on demand. And Packet’s proprietary technology automates physical servers and networks without the use of virtualization or multitenancy.
“Packet has been a critical supporter of CNCF since the very early days, long before the projects we host – including Kubernetes – had become the industry standard. They have contributed substantial free server resources over the last two years to CNCF’s Community Infrastructure Lab, which has been used to meaningfully increase development velocity for both CNCF-hosted projects and also other cloud native, open-source projects. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon San Diego in November 2019, Equinix joined CNCF as a gold member to demonstrate their support for the adoption of the cloud-native technologies,” stated Dan Kohn, Executive Director at Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Through the acquisition of Packet, Equinix will add important new on-demand deployment alternatives that meet the market’s full range of use cases. And with a combined Equinix and Packet solution, enterprises and service providers will be able to build and deploy low-latency services at the edge either through their choice of owned physical deployments or by utilizing the combined offering — which utilizes as-a-service consumption to reduce CAPEX and resource requirements.
Packet’s developer-friendly product, strong talent pool, an ecosystem of management-layer software providers, and customer base using the product for live workloads today are also going to add important new skills and assets to Equinix’s own product development and management capabilities.
“To successfully achieve digital transformation, organizations must focus on delivering availability, performance, security, and reliability to a massive set of applications while operating in a cost-effective and scalable manner. The best way to achieve this is through a comprehensive hybrid cloud strategy. Equinix and VMware have partnered for nearly a decade to enable hybrid cloud infrastructures, helping Global 2000 enterprises address the increasing volume and complexity of application workloads and data. The continued expansion of Platform Equinix will further enable our mutual customers to easily and more securely power their applications from the edge to the cloud,” commented Susan Nash, Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances at VMware.
