>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE covering AWS Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE. We have spent a great day in San Francisco at the AWS Summit. My co-host, George Gilbert, and I are very excited next to be talking to Eric Pan, the Senior Director of Alliances Marketing at Equinix. And Eric and I know each other when I worked at NetUP and you worked at VMware, so it's great to see you again. >> Back in the day. >> Back in the day. >> Eric: Yeah. It's great to be here, Lisa. >> It's great to have you on the CUBE. >> Eric: Thank you. >> So tell us about Equinix and what you're doing to help customers get to the cloud. >> Yes, love to. So Equinix was founded in 199-- ... 1998. We really have established what we call an interconnection data center platform. So Platform Equinix is a company that helps customers to interconnect with their trading partners, with networks, and customers. >> Excellent. And so one of the things that I actually just read yesterday, a press release, that Equinix just became part of the AWS partner network as an advanced technology partner. >> Eric: Right. >> Big news. >> Big news. So we've had a relationship with AWS for many years. We've established 14 points of presence around the world for what AWS calls their Direct Connect, which is, it's a great way for customers to be able to manage their hybrid clouds or mainline, if you will, directly into AWS, privately and bypassing the Internet entirely. So for us to be able to gain this certification, this badge if you will, it's a proud day at Equinix. >> Well, congratulations. Fantastic. I'm sure a lot of hard work has gone into that. >> Eric: Yes. >> So help us, talk though from a customer perspective, where they want to say, "I don't really want to apply any more of my real estate, and I, you know, I don't want to buy a lot more gear, but I have some stuff with legacy apps. And I'm actually starting to build out more in Amazon." What's that scenario? How do you help with that scenario? >> Right, so this is a very typical scenario we see every day with our customers. If I may just color this with what we call interconnection, Interconnection is, it is a set of ideas and concepts that we've established through many years of observing how our customers have worked with us and have built their infrastructure, both on-premises and into the cloud. So what you're referring to is really a hybrid cloud situation or scenario. And where a customer ideally says, "I would like to put the majority of my workloads and applications and maybe even data up in the cloud." But we know that's not practical. There's a lot of different reasons. Some of the reasons are data sovereignty or compliance or regulatory concerns. We see a lot of customers that have very specific hardware devices. For hardware maybe, certification or validation for certain things. So those sort of customers will come to Equinix. They'll place their own equipment within our data center. They'll manage that or they'll have a managed service provider come and help them with that. But they'll also be able to directly connect up into AWS. So that's one of the beauties of working with Equinix from our customers' perspective, is they get the best of both worlds. So they get to move their equipment out of their own data center, but they still have the look-and-feel or the management capability of on-premises. And then they also get to enjoy all the benefits of working in the cloud with AWS. >> So you've grown since early 2016, as we were chatting about before, Equinix has grown customer connections to AWS >> Eric: Yes, 250. >> 250% That's massive. >> Eric: Over 250%, yes. >> Over 250. Tell me just to get a little bit, kind of following on what you were just saying, what type of business would choose that route versus going, either keeping some on-prem then going right right to AWS or a cloud? Give us an understanding of really who this target market is. >> Sure, so really any and all enterprises would need to have this capability. The concept here with Direct Connect, it's really AWS' concept and where they say, "If you have certain applications that may be really heavy and are very compute-intensive or very data-intensive, you'll want to run those applications in AWS, and you want to make sure that you have good user experience around that." So Direct Connect privately connects from the end-user to AWS without zig-zagging through the Internet. You get predictability and performance. And what's really the most important thing is great user experience. >> And are you seeing the rise of enterprise as being more and more comfortable with migrating business-critical workloads? >> Oh absolutely yes. Yes, I went to Andy Jassy's fireside chat earlier today >> Lisa: Yeah, it was fantastic wasn't it? >> And he had a whole list of customers that are running business-critical applications. So we see a lot of customers that do that. And we also see, on the flip-side, a lot of customers, like what we were speaking about earlier in the hybrid cloud sense, that are running business-critical applications in AWS but they need to have their data local. So marked by regulatory or compliance issues in health care or in retail environments where PCI compliance demands that you have private data. And then in countries like, I'm just going to give you two examples, Canada and Germany, they have very stringent data sovereignty rules where you must have data in-country from operating on that data. So a lot of customers will use Direct Connect to connect up into AWS, but they'll also be able to maintain their data privacy if they need to. >> Just a drill down on that scenario, you know, there's debate as to, is there one cloud, one ring to rule them all? Or where is the sweet spots of different clouds? Would Equinix be for a customer who has a mission-critical application that's been running for years, that's got an Oracle database? They want to add some low-latency analytics, machine learning where they're scoring or predicting. So they want to put something close to where it's running. So they take the equipment from their data center, put it in Equinix, add around that application the low-latency stuff. >> Eric: Yes. >> And then maybe the digital experience part is in Amazon. >> Right. Yes. So we see many customers doing that very thing. And we also have a very close relationship with NetApp as a storage provider. And NetApp has an offering called NPS, or NetApp Private Storage. So symbiotically, we work together to provide what NetApp has as a ... Data Fabric, which they call. And in that scenario, the whole entire concept is based on running heavy applications or business applications in the cloud but having your data privately and distributed locally or close to where people live, work, and play. >> George: Okay. >> So one of the topics, actually, in, you mentioned attending Andy Jassy's fireside chat. I think we all did. It was fantastic. >> And one of the things that was really interesting was that he was talking about of all of the buzzwords, and as marketers, you know, we both know this, that IOT is the buzzword that he has seen really come to fruition. >> Eric: Come to life, right. >> The fastest. >> That was a fascinating part of his discussion. So we, Equinix, are at the center of, if you will, some of the things that are going on in the IOT world. So IOT, if you can imagine the Internet, a thing says that there's lots of different little devices or big devices like cars or huge devices like hydroelectric dams or jet engines. Those are all producing vast amounts of data that have to go somewhere. And the companies that, like Andy used GE for example in the wind turbines, the companies that need to look at that data, that are having to store that data or do something with it, they typically say, "Well, if we are based in one geographical city, and all this data is coming in from all over the world or all over some region, you need to have natural ingestion points for that data. So we, Equinix, are at the center of where data comes in. And then the next piece is, well, now that we have all this data or now that the organization has all this data in one place or maybe distributed in a few places, how do they then go operate on that? So the scenarios that we spoke about earlier, in where you have an application running up in AWS, to look at that data or, in some cases, there may be, like Andy talked about the Snowball and the Edge computing, Edge computing is something that Equinix very much puts forward as one of the concepts in our interconnection ideas. So that, it's kind of loud there. >> Sorry for the overhead announcement (laughs) >> So the idea around having all of these big data ingestion points, having Edge compute or cloud compute, Equinix becomes a really logical place for customers to be able to do all of that. And then, of course, there's all the data visualization. There's all the data analytics that have to occur with the data scientists. So maybe some of those analytics are running in AWS, but maybe some of the visualization pieces are running in other companies. I won't name the companies, but we all know who the data visualization companies are. >> Lisa: (laughs) >> So your points of presence are about 150 if ... >> Yes, we have 150 data centers in 40 of the biggest business-rich metros around the world. >> Now, do you see a need for a mini-data center or a point of presence that's more like when AOL had those dial-in >> Eric: (laughs) >> I mean, literally, it could've been one box that received phone calls and then ran them out over the network. And the reason I ask is when we have billions of devices, you might want points of presence in the thousands or hundreds of thousands even. >> Eric: Right. That is a very interesting question, and I kind of liken this to something that maybe is an easier idea to understand. A lot of us live in big cities. A lot of us work or ... A lot of us, yes, work at a big company. Some of us don't. A lot of us conduct our banking with big banks or small banks. So if you can imagine the world of maybe retail or banking where there's lots of little branch offices, those could be, we could think of those as maybe the mini-data center idea that you've brought up earlier. So in what Equinix calls interconnection, we have a concept that we call Edge Hub or Communications Hub, which is an idea in where we want to shorten the distance between where users live, work, and play and where the application is running. And so by doing that and simplifying the network topology, in the case that we're talking about, IOT, yes. You would definitely want to do that. So think of a branch office connecting up to a hub, if you will, a communications hub, as a natural ingestion point to bring in that data. >> So last question, Eric, as we wrap up here. We talked about the tremendous growth that Equinix has had just in the last not even 18 months alone and also the great news yesterday that you're very proud of and should be, as becoming an advanced technology partner of Amazon. So last word to you, what's next as an advanced technology partner of AWS? >> Wow. Well, if I can just maybe borrow some of Andy Jassy's words, we're not done here yet. There's no end in sight where Equinix goes. We continue to grow. We have over a third of the Fortune 500 customers that we've managed to attract and that are happy customers. We want to continue down that road and have 100% of the Fortune 500 customers. And we want to make all of our customers happy in working in this new era that we call cloud computing. >> Fantastic. Well, I think we can feel the momentum coming from you and very much Matt Schpive, the guys and the gals from AWS that were on stage today. So, Eric Pan, it's so great to see you after a few years of back in the day. >> Great to see you. Thanks for having me here. >> Absolutely, and for Eric Pan and my co-host George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the CUBE live from the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco. We will be right back. (futuristic electronic music)