Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) says it has closed its previously announced $335 million acquisition of Packet (see "Equinix agrees to buy Packet for bare metal automation expertise"). The bare metal automation platform company will operate as "Packet, an Equinix company," while developing products for enterprise customers that combine Packet's bare metal automation technology with Platform Equinix to enable the deployment of hybrid multicloud infrastructures. Former Packet CEO Zachary Smith will become managing director of the bare metal business.
Equinix describes “bare metal” as a category of digital infrastructure that enables businesses to deploy workloads on secure, single-tenant hardware that can be distributed geographically for proximity and performance. Such a hardware-only automation approach provides companies the freedom to select and deploy the operating system or virtualization software they choose. By being able to offer Bare Metal as a Service, Equinix and Packet believe they can help enterprises and service providers more flexibly and easily build and deploy low-latency services at the edge. Such deployments could leverage the customers’ choice of owned physical deployments or could use the combined offering, which leverages an “as-a-service” approach to reduce capex and resource requirements, Equinix states.
"The Packet acquisition represents a bold move to accelerate our strategy for helping enterprises quickly and seamlessly deploy hybrid multicloud architectures on Platform Equinix,” said Sara Baack, chief product officer at Equinix. “By combining Packet's innovative and agile bare metal automation technology with our dynamic data center and interconnection platform, we can offer our customers an alternate, agile way to deploy and consume private digital infrastructure. This approach will make it easier for our customers to extract greater value from our rich ecosystems, superior global reach, and the interconnection platform."
"As businesses around the world continue to digitally transform in order to gain competitive advantage, we've seen a rise in adoption for hybrid multicloud architectures as the infrastructure model of choice. A mix of on-premises, private cloud, and multiple public clouds into one seamless, global infrastructure is essential for optimizing different applications and workloads on a global scale,” commented Eric Hanselman, chief analyst, 451 Research, via an Equinix press release. “Bare metal automation simplifies the hardware ownership requirements for private cloud deployments and allows companies to select and deploy their own choice of operating system or virtualization software that best fits within their unique hybrid multicloud environments."
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