Interview with John Knuff, Equinix

On November 12, RTS announced with Equinix, Inc. that it now has data centers located in four Equinix sites in the United States, in addition to data centers in major cities in Europe and Asia. Global enterprises, content and financial companies as well as network service providers rely upon Equinix’s insight and expertise to protect and connect their most valued information assets.  Equinix operates 41 International Business ExchangeTM (IBX®) data centers across the world.

As the company is an RTS technology partner and the leading home to data centers and co-location facilities serving the financial industry, Screenshot spoke with John Knuff, Equinix Director of Business Development/Global, to offer readers additional insight into the organization and its facilities.

What is Equinix in a nutshell?
We’re a co-location and data center provider. We were founded 10 years ago by people who were instrumental in the earliest days of the Internet.  Equinix got its start as a neutral meeting place for the carrier and network industry.  What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is that our co-location and data center facilities are unique because they are the major crossroads for tele-communication carriers in a neutral environment.

What is the position of Equinix within the financial industry?
With the upsurge in electronic trading and the reliance on carriers, financial extranets and robust network offerings, our services have become more important than ever in the financial industry. We set ourselves apart from the competition in that we have actively sought out and made our centers a neutral meeting ground for approximately 300 carriers. Typically, we have anywhere from dozens to 100 carriers in each of our sites, which is a great value proposition for our clients.  So even when some of these carriers are competitors in their offering of co-location facilities – and large customers of ours as well – we are by far the market leader both nationally and globally in network interconnection. Our financial industry clients appreciate the ability to use one provider for both their primary and secondary sites.

What is your role within Equinix?
My role is to focus on the financial industry and to ensure that our products and requirements globally align with those of the financial industry.  I work very closely with a lot of the exchanges in the U.S., Europe and Asia on their deployment strategy.  It’s interesting that some of the exact drivers that created Equinix – the need to provide a neutral marketplace that’s connectivity-rich – are really present in the financial industry today.

What have you seen change in the past few years in terms of what is needed and what you provide?
A couple of things have changed.  There is now recognition from major exchanges that co-location is important to their client base.  They understand that traders want proximity to their matching engine. We’re also seeing increasing fragmentation in the markets – first in the securities world in the U.S. and now in Europe with the creation of multi-lateral trading facilities (MTFs). We’ll be seeing this in Asia soon as well. With all of the fragmentation, what’s important again is the network-rich offering. If your firm does market sweeps or smart order routing, it’s critical that you be in a location where you don’t have a latency disadvantage. 

How have 9/11 and the recent economic crisis affected your way of doing business?
9/11 had a tremendous impact, of course, on everyone.  In our case, we were very focused on September 17, 2001, when we were reconnecting networks and service providers and addressing the major outage in Manhattan as the markets prepared to re-open.  Post 9/11, what really hit home for companies was the importance of eliminating the possibility of single points of failure and putting disaster recovery plans in place. There was increasingly demand for a location that was geographically distant from the primary site. 

In regard to the current economic crisis, we’ve seen an uptick in business and acceleration of projects. Those firms that haven’t been exclusively employing electronic trading are recognizing the ability to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. Firms are also increasingly interested in pre-trade and post-trade risk monitoring.  With all of the M&A activity, that tends to lead to a good upsurge in demand for our services as well.

What is your outlook for 2009?
In 2009, we are expanding our presence in Asia beyond Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. In addition, we’re extending our Equinix Financial Exchange offering to Amsterdam, which is a good location for firms trading between London and Frankfurt. This will supplement our Chicago, New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt offerings.