Hi RockOYates,
I just read the article from your posting (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/inside-equ…).
I have to say reading the post was very reminiscent - the article talks about the IX (internet exchange) in NY and how it deals with the New York trading system. The equivalent one in Chicago (350 E Cermak) runs the CME. Both are massively occupied by Equinix.
I’ve included a few snippets from the article, but really there’s only one takeaway that you need, and that is on the last line. For the rest - you really need to see the list of customers that Equinix serves to truly appreciate that last line’s impact.
The 49 different exchanges that lease space at this data center sent a record 9.6 million messages per second through its fiber-optic cables in February. Every day, electronic trades representing trillions of dollars’ worth of equities, derivatives, currencies, and fixed-income assets pass under this roof. This is NY4. This is where Wall Street actually transacts.
It’s just one of the crown jewels of Equinix, the $22.2 billion company that’s quietly grown into the world’s largest owner of interconnected data centers. To give you an idea of Equinix’s lead in the space, you would have to add up the market value of its five closest U.S. competitors to roughly equal its market cap, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Equinix pitches its centers as more than just storage space for servers. Its clients pay in part because of who else is there. That includes the Chicago Board Options Exchange, Bats, ICAP, Nasdaq, the NYSE, and Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. IEX Group, the firm that starred in Michael Lewis’s 2014 book Flash Boys, stashes a key piece of its hardware in one of Equinix’s New Jersey data centers: a coil of fiber-optic cable that slows orders down by a fraction of a second. And those firms are just from the handful of financial industry customers Equinix discloses. It connects more than 6,300 businesses to their customers, and most of those firms don’t want it known that they lease one of NY4’s metal cages, which are identified only by numbers, not names.
Equinix’s nonfinancial clients, meanwhile, include some of the Internet’s biggest names: Amazon.com, AT&T, China Mobile, Comcast, Facebook, Hulu, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, Pandora, and Verizon. Much of the Internet is literally run through the nondescript buildings Equinix has scattered around the world. “They’re a crucial component of how the cloud works,” says Colby Synesael, an analyst at Cowen & Co. who covers Equinix. “It’s where the Internet lives.”
John Knuff, Equinix’s general manager for financial services, looks at this dense cohabitation and sees the future. “I always say, keep your customers close,” he says. “But keep your vendors even closer.”
Equinix is a big time Infinera customer. A simple search will show you where they’ve deployed solutions together: https://www.google.com/webhp?&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UT…
Equinix is also first on the list when you look at the list of customers that occupy each of Infinera’s markets: https://www.infinera.com/company/customers/
Equinix definitely relies on its vendors as the last line suggests and Infinera has been a very strategic one for their rather quiet build out. They also rely on partners. For example, they used a company called Spread Networks for the dark fibre route between the two financial markets in NY and Chicago. Want to know who helped Spread Networks? https://www.infinera.com/infinera-and-spread-networks-enable…
So, to repeat the question:
Kevin, do you know if INFN has any products located in this building I’ve just posted about on Free For All Economics?
Yeah, they’re in there all right. You may not see them in any of the pictures, but they’re in there.
Best,
–Kevin