Business & Money | Friday 9 March, 2018 1:06 am |

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the global interconnection and data center company is participating in Capacity Middle East 2018 that started Tuesday. Now in its 13th year, Capacity Middle East 2018 is the largest gathering of all Tier 1 carriers in the Middle East connecting them with international Tier 1 carriers & service providers. At the event, Equinix showcased how interconnection between service providers is powering global digital business.

One critical concern for enterprises today is how their increasing data and application workloads are being internally and externally transported over their corporate networks. Businesses cannot rely on the “best effort” performance and security of the public internet. This higher demand on enterprise network infrastructure capacity to privately exchange business traffic requires companies to establish a larger interconnection footprint at the edge. "This means that service providers need to expand and scale interconnection capacity, close to users at the edge, to deliver high-quality services that can manage secure, private data access for their customers. Our close interactions with our more than 9,500 customers puts us in a unique position to match what enterprises are looking for with the solution providers who can best meet their needs. Our customers look to us to help them develop their strategic digital transformation strategies, deployment roadmaps and partnerships by using our broad IT expertise and “score-card” analytics,” said Jeroen Schlosser, managing director at Equinix MENA.

Jeroen also represented Equinix, in a panel discussion at the event, talking about ‘Embracing the Cloud - Facilitating Greater Regional Cloud Adoption’. With Gartner estimating that cloud spending in the region has increased by 22% in the last year, the total spend currently sits at $1.2bn and is expected to reach $2bn by 2020. The main growth drivers are Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), which currently account for $1bn between them, according to Gartner. “Today’s network service providers (NSPs) are entering into a new era of competition and collaboration. No longer focused on providing enterprise customers a single capability, they know they require strategic partnerships with cloud and other service providers to deliver the added-value services their customers need, and to fill in any skill-set or capability gaps. Our participation at Capacity Middle East aims to highlight the power of Platform Equinix and how it gives companies the ability to deploy their digital infrastructure everywhere and connect to everyone.”

Equinix experts will be present at Grand Hyatt, Dubai from March 6th until 8th at Capacity Middle East.