BT & Equinix Expand Partnership to Improve Interconnectivity

BT is eager to help businesses transform interconnectivity across their digital value chains. As a result, it has lengthened its partnership with Equinix to help customers boost their digital transformation efforts, whilst also accelerating their business outcomes.

BT’s AI-ready, Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, is now deployed in more than 30 Equinix data-centres worldwide - a figure that is growing to over 40 in the next year. This will span the world’s top 30 business locations covering 95% of the world’s cloud interconnection traffic.

“The BT-Equinix partnership is a terrific example of our strategy to build the strongest digital foundations for our customers,” shares ​Matt Swinden, Director, Digital Connectivity, Business at BT. “Global Fabric combined with Equinix’s global ecosystem of infrastructure, cloud and digital service widens the choice we offer to customers of the best locations to interconnect their full business value chain. 

“It will help make trading, partnering and operating a multinational business better on BT.”

What is Global Fabric?

BT has been working for some time to bolster its digital transformation efforts, focusing on the quality of its data to drive forward AI innovations.

Global Fabric is a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solution that connects multinational organisations securely, flexibly and reliably. 

It is designed to transform the ease at which businesses can deploy and scale interconnectivity with third parties such as customers and suppliers across their full digital value chain.

The solution also offers visibility and control of both access and core networks to allow organisations for strong end-to-end network performance for their workloads, from users and devices in offices and factories. It can also be used for the multi-cloud core, which interconnects apps and digital services including AI.

BT says Global Fabric is built on a fully resilient architecture and offers a range of management options, ensuring that changing connectivity is able to happen instantly. 

Having the platform integrated into Equinix data centres will add to its international footprint, which BT believes will be one of the largest of any NaaS platform. When fully built-out, Global Fabric will be available to customers internationally via 140 points-of-presence (PoPs) hosted in the world’s top cloud locations across 40 countries. 

It will also offer 74% coverage of hyperscaler clouds and high-bandwidth connectivity to more than 700 data-centres.

Bolstering data centre networks

Equinix’s global platform interconnects multiple clouds hosting the apps, solutions and marketplaces underpinning the digital economy. 

The agreement with BT expands the telco’s ability to offer customers a comprehensive choice of leading strategic locations for businesses to digitally interconnect with partners, suppliers, customers and other stakeholders across their full value chain.

This pledge builds on BT Group’s quantum secure communications relationship with Equinix, following the joint achievement of the UK’s first data centre to data centre connection using the technology.

Both companies also collaborated when Equinix acquired BT’s data centre business in the Republic of Ireland, as part of its plan to expand its global interconnection platform and better support its customers with hybrid cloud solutions.

According to Equinix’s Global Interconnection Index, digital ecosystems are growing at a significant rate, with 80% of business-to-business sales interactions expected to occur in digital channels by the end of 2025. 

By integrating industry value chains, Equinix says leading businesses are innovating at a rate 25% higher than their peers.

Arun Dev, Global Interconnections, Equinix, says: “Our partnership enables BT to offer its customers interconnectivity with the full Equinix global digital ecosystem of cloud and IT services, as well as hundreds of content and digital media services and over 4,800 enterprises hosted at our datacentres globally.”

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