 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to theCUBE. We have spent a great day in San Francisco. At the AWS Summit, co-host George Gilbert and I are very excited next to be talking to Eric Pahn, the Senior Director of Alliances Marketing at Equinex and Eric and I know each other when I worked at NetApp and you worked at VMware, so it's great to see you again. Back in the day. Back in the day. Yeah, it's great to be here, Lisa. It's great to have you on theCUBE. So tell us about Equinex and what you're doing to help customers get to the cloud. Yes, love to. So Equinex was founded in 1998. We really have established what we call an interconnection data center platform. So Platform Equinex 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 Equinex just became part of the AWS partner network as an advanced technology partner, 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 Equinex. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Fantastic. I'm sure a lot of hard work has gone into that. Yes. It's helped us talk through from a customer perspective where they want to say, I don't really want to apply anymore of my real estate and I don't want to buy a lot more gear, but I have some stuff with legacy apps. Yes. 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 that 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 Equinex. 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 Equinex from our customer's 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, Equinex has grown customer connections to AWS. Yes, 250. Over 250%. 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 either keeping some on-prem and going 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's concept in 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 zigzagging through the internet. So you get predictability and performance and what's really the most important thing is great user experience. And are you seeing the rise of enterprises being more and more comfortable with migrating business critical workloads? Oh, absolutely, yes. Yes, I mean, I went to Andy Jassy's spire side chat earlier today. 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. 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 healthcare 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 roles where you must have data in country from operating on that data. So a lot of customers will use Direct Connect to connect up in the AWS. They'll also be able to maintain their data privacy if they need to. Just to drill down on that scenario, you know, there's this debate as to is there one cloud, one ring to rule them all, or where the sweet spots are different clouds. Would Equinix be for a customer who has a mission critical application that's been running for years, it's got an Oracle database, they want to add some low latency analytics, you know, machine learning, whether they're scoring or predicting like, 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, 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. Okay. So one of the topics actually in, you mentioned attending Andy Jastie's fireside chat, we all did, it was fantastic. And one of the things that was really interesting was that he was talking about all of the buzzwords and as marketers, we know, we both know this, that IoT is the buzzword that he has seen really come to fruition, 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 of things 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 and the wind turbines, the companies that are, 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, we're at the center of where data comes in. And then the next piece is, well, now that we have all this data now that the organization has all this data in one place or it may be 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, it's kind of out there. Sorry for the overhead announcement. So the idea around having all 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. Would it, so your points of presence are about 150? Yes, we have 150 data centers and 40 of the biggest business-rich metros around the world. 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, literally, it could have 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. So, 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 at a big company, some of us don't. A lot of us conduct our banking with big banks or small banks to, 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 Echonex 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 Echonex 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 is 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 Echonex 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 and 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 matched by the guys from AWS that were on stage today. So, Eric Kwan, so great to see you after a few years and back in the day. Great to see you. Thanks for having me here. Absolutely. And for Eric Kwan and my co-host, George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE live from the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco. We will be right back.