Telstra extends global reach with deeper Equinix tie-up

Australia-based Telstra is expanding its global reach to more than 170 cloud providers in 38 global markets by strengthening its ties with Equinix.

Telstra is integrating its API with Equinix's ECX Fabric to give its customers direct connections to global cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud Platform. With Equinix, Telstra is also able to expand into North America and Europe.

Using its own software-defined networking platform, TPN, Telstra can now give its customers cloud access in minutes. By interconnecting TPN to ECX Fabric, Telstra increased the number of cloud service providers from 60 to more than 170.

RELATED: Equinix buys bare metal data center company Packet

ECX Fabric, which is an on-demand, software-defined enabled interconnection service, is now available across 38 locations. Equinix, which announced on Tuesday that it was buying bare metal cloud startup Packet to increase its edge computing capabilities, is far and away the colocation market leader.

In addition to Packet, Equinix announced in October that it was buying three data centers from Axtel for $175 million. That deal closed last week.

Also in October, Equinix announced it had completed the formation of a $1 billion joint venture with partner GIC, which is Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, to build and operate hyperscale data centers in Europe. In September, Equinix expanded the global reach of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure across five continents to help enterprise customers connect to Oracle Cloud.

Colocation facilities are taking on added importance as enterprises embark on their digital transformations. Enterprises and service providers are moving into colocation facilities so they can connect to the cloud, to IoT applications and services, and to other enterprises and service providers.

A colocation site is a data center facility where a business can rent space for servers and other computing hardware. Most colocations include the building, cooling, power, bandwidth and physical security, while the customer provides servers and storage.