Vision quest

Eighteen months ago, Equinix conceived of a place where the players that make the Internet go - ISPs, carriers, content providers - could gather to interact and prosper. Equinix saw this as a place that would defy current models by letting these players choose partners from amongst themselves rather than having a network carrier make the selection.

"About a year-and-a-half ago, I wouldn't call it more than a vision," says Peter Van Camp, Equinix's CEO. "The company has just done a lot of great work, evangelized the model and worked with everyone from the carriers to managed service providers... all getting access to the networks at this exchange point that we built on the Internet."

The Internet Business Exchange, or IBX, is typically a 100,000- to 300,000-square-foot facility full of the electronics needed to make a Web venture successful.

"The Internet is no single network - it's all these backbones that interconnect with each other," Van Camp explains. "At intersection points of all these backbones, we've created one of the most secure and full facilities on the Internet to allow all these service components to come together in a facility and interconnect with each other."

The IBX succeeds, he says, because "there's just no more powerful place now to implement content and e-commerce solutions because of the actual proximity of being adjacent to all these service providers and the edge of all these networks."

Intriguingly, companies that thrive in the Ether-space need the bricks-and-mortar office reality. "There is a physical aspect of connecting networks and services. Bringing it all together in one place lets people connect across the room and really sets everything they do at kind of an origin point of Internet connectivity," Van Camp says.

Equinix has opened IBXs in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and Silicon Valley and will add sites in Secaucus, N.J., and London next year. Network providers connect to all six sites to create key points around the Internet where traffic flows can go. Each additional site that's connected re-architects that region of the network into its new location.

Equinix gives its clients more than a gathering place, Van Camp emphasizes, by allowing them the freedom to interact with each other and to select the partners that best serve their Internet needs. "The customer will come to an Equinix IBX and assemble a best-in-breed or best-in-application fit from all the service providers and sit there and deliver service," he says.

Equinix then adds value by managing and monitoring the network performance.

The Equinix model is about choice, Van Camp says. So far it has drawn network/ISP providers such as Ameritech, Verizon, Cable & Wireless, UUNet and WorldCom; managed service providers Loudcloud, Akamai and IBM; and content/e-commerce companies such as Epoch, Forbes.com and the National Hockey League.

"Our twist on the business model is we provide a choice from the best-of-breed providers of everything that you would need across the value chain," Van Camp says.

The openness of the concept, he says, is what has allowed it to flourish during the last 18 months and grow outside the previously structured Internet services marketplace.

"The momentum of the model is just starting to show up in a big way," he says. "Today, we've opened six facilities. Three, from a pure business standpoint, have become EBITDA-positive. That just creates, obviously, a strong business momentum for the company to continue to grow."