DC Post MEA speaks with Kamel Al-Tawil, Managing Director for Middle East and North Africa at Equinix highlights that the company will introduce ECX Fabric platform at this year’s Gitex Technology Week and explains that Equinix has opted for a virtual participation and exhibiting rather than physically exhibiting at the event.
Kamel Al-Tawil, Managing Director for Middle East and North Africa, Equinix
How would you describe your company?
Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company, enabling digital leaders to harness a trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success. Equinix is where companies come together to realize new opportunities and accelerate their business, IT, and cloud strategies. With the most networks and interconnection options, Equinix helps businesses to get connected, stay connected and expand connections via a dynamic ecosystem of partners, networks, and carriers. Customers also benefit from direct connections to corporate WAN providers, enterprise, cloud, and managed service providers.
What will be your primary interest areas during Gitex Technology Week?
Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company and at this years’ edition of Gitex Technology Week, we remain focused on digital transformation and Interconnection and explore how our offerings are making a difference to our partners’ businesses.
Which are the key products are you planning to introduce at Gitex this year?
As global IT decision-makers respond to an increasingly dynamic world including competitive pressures, growing customer demands, globalization, and challenges posed by COVID-19, many are accelerating their digital transformation efforts and continuing to prioritize the adoption of hybrid and multicloud solutions. This year at Gitex Technology Week, Equinix will introduce its Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric) platform to help digital businesses simplify hybrid multicloud deployments and expand their global interconnection opportunities on Platform Equinix.
How does ECX Fabric help regional enterprises?
ECX Fabric is an advanced interconnection solution that enables seamless, on-demand and direct access to multiple clouds and networks across the globe. By bringing together cloud service providers with enterprises consuming cloud, and enabling them to establish private, high-performance connections, ECX Fabric gives enterprises direct access to the services they need to build sophisticated hybrid cloud solutions. Furthermore, customers can utilize the solution to extend their market reach and increase privacy, performance, and reliability of cloud service connections.
It enables customers to:
- Utilize advanced interconnection capabilities: ECX Fabric is a next-generation interconnection solution providing direct on-demand access to multiple clouds and networks. It streamlines cloud adoption processes for partners and users, accelerates delivery times and provides a higher quality and more secure cloud user experience.
- Minimize security threats with secure, high-performance connections: Better manage a wide range of business and technology risks and create secure, private connections bypassing the public internet with hybrid, multicloud solutions. ECX Fabric provides virtualized, private direct connections that bypass the internet to provide better security and performance with a range of bandwidth options.
- Adopt on-demand, automated connectivity to clouds: Determine how and where connections occur, with flexible bandwidth options, WAN-optimization, and SD-WAN solutions.
- Access many virtual circuits via one port: Connect to many participants (clouds, networks, enterprise customers) over a single physical port, enabling dynamic bandwidth allocation among various parties.
- Harness growth and success of the cloud: ECX Fabric gives rise to new possibilities for the cloud; automated provisioning of enterprise-grade cloud solutions through dense ecosystems of providers represents the next step forward in the growth and success of the cloud.
Which industry verticals are key to your business?
Equinix’s global platform offers solutions spanning a wide range of industries to help enterprises and service providers achieve success in the digital economy.
Some of the industry verticals are aerospace, automotive, banking, education, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail, to name a few.
How do you think social distancing and COVID-19 protocols will impact this year’s Gitex?
The UAE’s management of the pandemic has been recognized across the world. We trust Dubai World Trade Centre to implement the most rigorous health and safety regulations, to ensure the wellbeing of all exhibitors and visitors. As with every industry, coming together physically only creates value and we recognize the efforts being put in to deliver a safe and impactful Gitex.
What do you expect to gain from Gitex Technology Week?
Despite the challenges of this year, it is a positive sign to see the industry come together from around the world. Technology has played an instrumental role in driving economic continuity in 2020 and at GITEX we look forward to discovering innovative best practices and showcasing areas in which we continue to make major advances
Equinix has been participating at Gitex year-after-year with the aim to stay up to date on the latest discoveries from Multicloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Machine Learning (ML) are fundamentally changing the way data is being produced, shared and analyzed.
