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Equinix gears for cloud density influx into Australia

Equinix APAC director of cloud Eric Hui has predicted the number of cloud providers in Australia will increase over the next year as more businesses adopt cloud.
Written by Aimee Chanthadavong, Contributor

While there is a greater uptake of cloud in Australia than in Singapore, the cloud density is still greater in Singapore, according to Eric Hui, Equinix APAC director of cloud.

However, Hui has predicted the cloud density gap between Australia and Singapore is not expected to last too much longer.

"The density will grow next year in Australia. I don't know whether it will surpass Singapore or not, but I think the growth trajectory will get very close," he said.

He suggested the main driver of the growth will be the increasingly large cloud adoption in Australia.

"Because of this phenomenon I think there will be a closer look by inbound cloud providers to land in Australia," he said.

Most recently, Equinix signed a deal with Oracle to put the enterprise software giant's cloud services on the Equinix Cloud Exchange. Equinix had signed similar deals with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, IBM SoftLayer, and Google's Cloud Platform.

Locally in Australia, Equinix has three facilities in Sydney and one in Melbourne. In April, the company committed to pouring more than AU$97 million into building a fourth datacentre in Sydney, which will be interconnected to the other three datacentres that will be located nearby via dense dedicate fibre loop.

Jeremy Deutsch, Equinix Australia managing director, told ZDNet the company is committed to opening new datacentres and expanding existing ones as long as customers demand for it.

He further noted that Australia is "quite advanced" in cloud adoption mainly because there is a higher percentage of Australian corporations that are already adopting hybrid cloud. Deutsch further added when it comes to hybrid cloud, enterprises are after flexibility, performance, innovation, and choice.

"Every corporation knows they need a solution. They need a nice platform to architect and they know what they need for a hybrid environment now is not what they need tomorrow. They say: 'I don't know what I need tomorrow, but I need a platform that will give me access to it'," he said.

Hui agreed saying hybrid cloud is gaining a lot of traction, particularly over the last year in Australia where more enterprises are looking to use more applications in their environment.

"The whole hybrid phenomenon is here to stay and grow. Data sits on-premise and you can use any of these multi-cloud providers to help you run services and grab all of that data," he said.

"There will be more and more solutions that come out of that, and there will even be analytical engines because people talk about big data. For example, insurance firms are asking people to wear wristbands to monitor their life so they can see whether you're at risk."

Hui said from a regional perspective the rest of Asia Pacific is looking to learn from Australia.

"A lot of the Australian-based corporates are going abroad to Asian markets, and are taking a lot of this knowledge sharing it has to local companies. I think that itself is educating the market and is making businesses more risk tolerant in these new platforms. They're catching up but are still learning a lot from Australia," he said.

In September, Equinix bought Tokyo-based Bit-isle for AU$397 million as part of plans to strengthen its position in the Japanese market. Under the terms of the deal, which is expected to be finalised in the first quarter of 2016, Equinix will gain five datacentres in Tokyo and one in Osaka that is in close proximity to the existing Equinix International Business Exchange datacentres in Japan.

Earlier this year, Equinix also opened its third datacentre in Singapore. Dubbed SG3, it is the company's largest in the Asia-Pacific region, spanning 385,000 square feet, and is fully interconnected to its other two local facilities.

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