Bare Metal Leader Packet to be acquired by Equinix
Jan 14, 2020; REDWOOD CITY, California
Equinix intends to create a world-class, bare-metal offering which is enterprise-grade across Platform Equinix
The global interconnection and data center company, Equinix, has announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the leading bare metal automation platform, Packet. With this, customers can leverage bare metal services at Equinix in order to deploy digital infrastructure on demand, and thus be better equipped to interconnect everyone, reach everywhere and integrate all the things in their business. This acquisition is set to accelerate Equinix’s strategy which will help enterprises deploy hybrid multi-cloud architectures seamlessly on Platform Equinix® thus extracting greater value from this top-notch platform’s rich ecosystems as well as global interconnection fabric.
With Packet offering to accelerate the development and delivery of the interconnected edge services, Equinix is expected to leverage on this and hopes to combine Packet’s developer-oriented bare metal service with Equinix’s interconnection capabilities. With this, Equinix intends to create a world-class, bare-metal offering which is enterprise-grade across Platform Equinix for customers to rapidly deploy digital infrastructure, at global scale within minutes. This acquisition is expected to close during the first quarter of the fiscal year 2020.
Some highlights of the acquisition
- Businesses are adopting the hybrid multi-cloud and edge architectures as the digital infrastructure of choice due to the pace of digital transformation which has created a rapid shift in the enterprise today.
- A dynamic data center and interconnection platform, Platform Equinix is essential for any enterprise which deploys hybrid multi-cloud at the edge. Platform Equinix has a global footprint of more than 200 International Business Exchange™ data centers. It has the most physically and virtually interconnected ecosystems in the world, with the highest share of the world’s public cloud on-ramps.
- With the acquisition of Packet, Equinix will be adding important on-demand deployment alternatives in order to meet the market’s full range of any use cases. Having a combined Equinix and Packet solution, service providers and enterprises would be able to deploy low-latency services at the edge by utilizing the combined offering, which leverages consumption as-a-service to reduce CAPEX and resource requirements or through their choice of owned physical deployments.
Bare metal, a key foundational element allows customers to deploy hybrid, distributed multi-cloud infrastructure on demand. The packet is a proven leader in bare metal automation and their proprietary technology automates physical servers and networks not using any virtualization or multitenancy.
According to Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem, Google Cloud, who believes that customer choice is paramount and is supporting them selecting the right computing environment in order to meet their enterprise needs. With the addition of Packet bare metal, Equinix will be able to deliver more customer choice, thereby accelerating their digital transformations when connecting workloads from on-prem to the cloud by seamlessly using technologies such as Google Anthos.
Sara Baack, Chief Product Officer, Equinix
“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 a 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.”
Dan Kohn, the Executive Director of Cloud Native Computing Foundation states that Packet has been a critical supporter of CNCF right from early on. They have contributed significant free server resources in the last two years to CNCF’s Community Infrastructure Lab, and this has been used for both CNCF-hosted projects and other cloud-native to increase development velocity.
Comments of Zachary Smith, the CEO of Packet
“We started Packet in 2014 with a vision to redefine the next wave of the 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 the Packet’s unique offering.”