Peter Van Camp, president and interim CEO of Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX), participated in a video interview at Nareit’s REITweek: 2018 Investor Conference in New York.
As Equinix approaches its 20th anniversary, Van Camp notes that the company has 200 data centers in 52 markets around the world.
“The biggest factor in that success over the 20 years though is really being an interconnection company first,” he said. “Those data centers are housing customers who want to be there to connect to the other customers that are in the building.”
Van Camp said that in the company’s early days, the business centered around internet networks and their destinations. “This required a physical place where interconnection took place—where a network would connect to a destination. That user could arrive at that internet destination,” he said.
Today though, “it’s the cloud service providers, the networks [and] the businesses that are using digital in their strategy” that are the new customers of Equinix. “[That’s] a strong portion of our business—16 percent, 17 percent of our revenues now,” he said. “It’s about the interconnection between these customers.”
Van Camp said that data centers are a global business. “Almost 60 percent of our revenue is coming from customers who are actually doing business with us in all three regions of the world (the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific),” he said, adding that “EMEA and APAC were really strong contributors from a growth standpoint last quarter.”
Van Camp said that the company’s recent acquisitions of Infomart Dallas and Metronode were about expanding its platform.
“Certainly, Metronode makes us a market leader in Australia,” he said, noting that Australia has “a very cloud-first business community.”
He added that the Metronode acquisition stretches all the way to Perth, which is a cable landing station. “An important part of our business is (that) Equinix has really more cable landing stations than any data center company, because these are carrying the users and data to get to this interconnection model,” he said.
Van Camp said that in the case of the Infomart acquisition, Dallas was already a strong market for Equinix.
“We were in that facility, but we bought the building and all the data center capacity within that,” he said. “It should be a very good growth market for us.”