Equinix Rolls Out Global Channel Program

Equinix has launched a global channel partner program to capture more revenue in the enterprise hybrid cloud market.

In addition to a formalization of partnership activities, the company has expanded the types of partnership engagements it makes, and has increased the amount of resources behind its partnership initiatives. The program extends across the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.

The company is looking for managed service providers, network service providers, system integrators and solution providers that can combine with Equinix to design and deploy cloud and IT solutions for enterprise customers. These cloud channel partners can act as resellers, referral agents or cloud technology platform partners.

“In our data centers, network service providers and cloud service providers are going to be the motivating factors to get the enterprise customers to move workloads out of the basement,” said Pete Hayes, chief sales officer at Equinix.

Equinix has several partnerships already in place, but the program changes the dynamic of these partnerships, the company said.

“In the past, Equinix had more referral types of partners,” explained Christopher Rajiah, vice president of worldwide channel sales and alliances. “This expands to support different sales motions, resale or technology partnerships. We’re taking different ways to partner and taking it to a global level. Channel is a key strategy going forward.”

Channel partners can tap into Equinix’s established ecosystems and products, such as Cloud Exchange and Performance Hub. The Cloud Exchange provides direct access to multiple clouds and multiple networks from a single port. The Equinix Performance Hub meanwhile distributes a company’s data center infrastructure across multiple locations to accelerate application delivery to employees, customers and partners worldwide.

“Enterprise customers are trying to serve different communities and running into complications in globally supporting a dispersed customer base,” said Hayes. “There’s an enterprise need to deliver mission critical applications in cloud. This [program] is high-level engagement around enterprise customer engagements.”