Equinix completes Packet acquisition

.

As a part of the $335 million transaction, the combined company will operate the existing Packet business as “Packet, an Equinix company,” while developing new solutions for enterprise customers that combine Packet’s leading bare metal automation technology with the rich ecosystems, global reach and interconnection fabric of Platform Equinix®. Zachary Smith, former CEO of Packet, will serve as managing director of the bare metal business. 

By leveraging Packet’s innovative and developer-oriented bare metal service offering to accelerate its organic bare metal solution development, Equinix aims to create advanced solutions for enterprises to rapidly deploy digital infrastructure at global scale with differentiated performance and robust integration to the public cloud. Businesses will be able to deploy advanced IT infrastructures via the physical or virtual consumption model of their choice, enabling them to more easily reach everywhere, interconnect everyone and integrate everything that matters to their business.

As enterprises today embrace digital transformation and adopt hybrid multicloud and edge architectures as the modern digital infrastructure of choice, the most forward-thinking organizations are increasingly recognizing the need for speed, agility, control and flexibility when managing their hybrid multicloud workloads.  

Bare metal is a new category of digital infrastructure, enabling businesses to deploy workloads  on secure, single-tenant hardware, distributed geographically for proximity and performance.  Focused on hardware-only automation, bare metal allows companies to select and deploy their own choice of operating system or virtualization software in hybrid multicloud environments. A proven leader in bare metal automation, Packet's proprietary technology automates physical servers and networks without the use of virtualization or multitenancy.  

Bare Metal as a Service allows companies to rapidly deploy physical infrastructure at the edge. With a combined Equinix and Packet solution, enterprises and service providers can gain the agility and flexibility they need to build and deploy low-latency services at the edge either through their choice of owned physical deployments, or by utilizing the combined offering, which leverages as-a-service consumption to reduce CAPEX and resource requirements.

For Equinix’s cloud partners, an Equinix bare metal offering will also help accelerate global hybrid cloud deployments and increase enterprise consumption of their cloud services by reducing the time to market for deployments and enabling new use cases that require both public cloud and private infrastructure.