Autonomous Vehicles Equinix

Equinix is the world’s largest data centre and colocation infrastructure provider – and they’re speaking at our upcoming event titled Autonomous Vehicles and the Built Environment with Petrina Anne Steele, Global Lead for Connected Autonomous Vehicles and Smart Mobility, taking to the virtual stage. Ahead of the event we’ve discussed their role in autonomous vehicles and building next generation infrastructure and environments…

Q. Equinix has established itself as a leader in digital infrastructure, and a £1.8bn company, what has enabled you to grow to such an extent?

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company. Digital leaders harness our trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success. We enable our customers to access all the right places, partners and possibilities they need to accelerate advantage. With Equinix, they can scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value.

IDC recently recognized us the Leader in their Inaugural IDC MarketScape Report for Worldwide Colocation and Interconnection Service, where it felt our strengths lay in the following 3 areas:

  • Evolution
  • Sustainability
  • Innovation [emaillocker id=”71749″]

Our Telecomms Research Vice President Courtney Munroe recently said Equinix’s strength is the company’s comprehensive global footprint that has seen its brand become synonymous with neutral colocation data centers. Platform Equinix provides customers value that is extremely difficult and expensive for its rivals to emulate. These three things and the people who work at Equinix continuously strive to do the best for our customers and partners, working to better understand what our customers from different industries and what what our technology partners are hoping to do not just in the here and now, but also what they want to do in the future and how we can help them achieve that.

Q. What projects does Equinix have in the pipeline?

Lots! Mainly continuing all the good work from 2020.

  • Working on rolling out our new edge services to complement our existing product lines, working with customers and partners to understand where they feel these are most valuable for them.
  • Further expansion into new metros and also ensuring we have capacity in our existing portfolio. In the latter part of 2020, we added 2 new countries (Canada and India) making us the world leader in both IBX count 220+) and revenues [Q3 2020 revenues $1.520 billion, a 3% increase over the previous quarter]
  • Continuing to support our existing nearly 10,000 customers (and hopefully acquire some new ones) and driving our global interconnections. Today, Equinix has the most comprehensive global interconnection platform, comprising over 386,000 physical and virtual interconnections [Q3 2020 figures, Equinix added 8,500 net interconnections in Q3]
  • Focus on emerging technologies, like 5G, IoT, edge computing together with partners and industry leaders to better understand the challenges and new architectures that will need to be in place to support adoption of these for our customers.

Q. What has been the impact of the pandemic on the data industry, and how did the growth of virtual services and event affect the sector?

Our recently published Global Interconnection Index (GXI) shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on how businesses are planning their digital infrastructure initiatives over the next three years.

Digital service providers within industries like telecommunications, cloud and IT services, content and digital media and technology providers are forecast to increase private connectivity bandwidth five times by 2023, according to the Global Interconnection Index (GXI). Download link here: https://www.equinix.co.uk/gxi-report/

The growth is driven by greater demands from enterprises to close digital gaps at the edge.

The distingushed David Cappuccio – VP Analyst recently said: “As interconnected services, cloud providers, distributed cloud, edge services and SaaS offerings continue to proliferate, the rationale to stay only in a traditional data centre topology will have limited advantages. This is not an overnight shift, but an evolutionary change in thinking how we deliver services to our customers and to the business. This trend, coupled with the new reality that outside factors might limit physical access to the data centre (such as emergency quarantine), is driving new thinking in infrastructure planning.”

The report also forecasts that overall interconnection bandwidth will achieve a 45% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019 to 2023. The expected growth is driven by digital transformation, and specifically by greater demands from enterprises extending their digital infrastructure from centralised locations to distributed edge locations.

The capacity of this connectivity is equivalent to 64 zettabytes of data exchange, according to the report.

Digital leaders have to prepare for post-pandemic recovery by planning and implementing the right digital transformation initiatives now. Equinix believe those that have a foundational infrastructure which helps bring together all the right place, partners and possibilities will gain a business advantage over the long term.

Q. To what extent is Data management an integral prerequisite for autonomous driving?

We are learning together with our customers and partners in this space that not only is the data mgmt. part critical in the quest for driverless vehicles but that in general, all the elements surrounding data are also important elements to consider to give a holistic view. For example, the aggregation of data from different sources, using different connectivity methods, the storage and mgmt. of that data in both on prem and in the cloud environments as well as access to AI platforms for data analytics and ultimately then the sharing of that data.

Q. How are Equinix data centres supporting the autonomous car industry develop?

There are several ways that our global platform is helping the autonomous car industry develop, from building next generation environments that best able V2X architectures or optimize edge computing infrastructures to helping with all the elements around data management that we discussed earlier.

One of the key use cases as it pertains to ADAS R&D are around helping some of our customers who are testing cars around the world to optimize the ingestion of data into their own HPC environments or into the cloud for hardware in the loop or software in the loop testing.

Automated vehicles record and process massive amounts of data daily with simulations and high capacity sensors. For many of our customers, the biggest challenge was how to securely store, transfer and process these large amounts of data. Read more about how we help boost data Intake, Speed with Interconnection with our Elektrobit case study: https://www.equinix.co.uk/resources/case-studies/elektrobit-adas-connected-software/

Q. Equinix will be speaking at the upcoming Autonomous Vehicles and the Built Environment event, what are you most anticipating about the event?

Getting the chance to connect with others in the industry to hear their viewpoints, listen to emerging use cases and technology and see whether what we as Equinix are seeing evolve in the industry – for example, the innovation and the enhanced collaboration between the technology companies is something that is happening around the world.

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