Equinix Expands Cisco, Nvidia Alliance To Help Partners Move AI From Pilots To Production

‘We’re working deeply with Cisco to connect the Cisco secure AI Factory architecture with Nvidia to accelerate that AI factory capability. We’re also working with Presidio around PATH, their Programmable AI Tech Hubs that we believe will help them accelerate customers from the experimental and pilot phases of AI into full AI production across the enterprise,’ says Gordon Mackintosh, Equinix’s senior vice president of global partner sales and ecosystems.

Digital infrastructure and data center colocation provider Equinix Tuesday unveiled an expanded collaboration with Cisco and Nvidia which the company said will make it easier for customers and channel partners to deploy the Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia by providing standard AI factory blueprints across its global network.

Equinix currently has 280 data centers across the world servicing 77 markets and 10,000 customers, 3,000 of which are cloud customers, said Gordon Mackintosh, senior vice president of global partner sales and ecosystems for Redwood City, Calif.-based Equinix.

Working with Cisco and Nvidia over the years, Equinix has built an interconnection that has expanded into an ecosystem that has evolved for new workloads, Mackintosh (pictured) told CRN.

“New AI workloads need this ecosystem for them to be deployed successfully,” he said. “We’re working deeply with Cisco to connect the Cisco secure AI Factory architecture with Nvidia to accelerate that AI factory capability. We’re also working with Presidio around PATH, their Programmable AI Tech Hubs that we believe will help them accelerate customers from the experimental and pilot phases of AI into full AI production across the enterprise.”

PATH is an Equinix and Presidio project that allows customers to test the outcomes that they can drive in the enterprise before more broadly scaling them out into enterprise production, Mackintosh said.

“Given where the market is shifting and this move from AI testing to production, we definitely see this as just the first of many engagements with partners across the globe,” he said.

The expanded Equinix-Cisco-Nvidia relationship gives customers the opportunity to expand and adopt generative AI where they don’t have the data center utilities to be able to support it, said Chad Dunn, vice president of solution engineering in the solution engineering group of Presidio, a New York-based solution provider and Equinix channel partner.

“We see that time and time again, especially in the metropolitan areas,” Dunn told CRN. “We see the expansion of data center providers like Equinix is incredibly important to enable the expansion of generative AI now for us, and the reason behind the partnership that we announced with PATH is we want to be able to get demonstrations, proof of concept, proof of value experimentation capabilities into the hands of our customers.”

Having Equinix as part of that solution is key, Dunn said.

“Not only does it give us the data center facilities that we need to support the kind of infrastructure we need for generative AI, but they have a huge specialty in network interconnects so if we need to be connected to our customer environments, it’s very simple for us to do that, and that’s a big value-add from Equinix,” he said.

Presidio could have done something similar without Equinix, and there are certainly other data center providers the company could have used, Dunn said.

“I think that what attracts us to Equinix is, first of all, the footprint is global and substantial and growing, and that differentiator around the interconnect specialty they have is really important to us,” he said. “We firmly believe that AI is going to be hybrid. Remember when cloud first came out, people wondered if everything would all go to the cloud? What’s going to remain on-prem? We all know that settled down to be a hybrid environment. It’s going to be no different with AI.”

The typical small and midsize enterprise customers Presidio deals with don’t have the power, cooling, or infrastructure to deal with some of the modern systems that are based on Nvidia Grace Blackwell or Vera Rubin technologies, Dunn said.

“This is all going to be liquid-cooled at some point, and those capabilities don’t exist at our customer facilities in that market segment, and exists pretty rarely in the enterprise segment as well, unless they commit to a pretty large build out,” he said. “With Equinix out there providing economies of scale, being able to negotiate favorable power prices, and making it easy to adopt, it puts us in a good position to get this technology into the hands of our customers.”

Equinix has built strong partnerships with Cisco and Nvidia over the years, Mackintosh said.

“What’s net new here is driving into purpose-built architectures that are pre-tested to enable the future demands of the enterprise, in particular AI workloads running across the enterprise,” he said. “We’re creating practical blueprints with some of the industry leaders like Nvidia and Cisco to create turnkey full stacks, reduce time to tokens, and de-risking the move to production AI from testing. … We’re offering deeper integration into Cisco’s and Nvidia’s architectures alongside our architecture with our digital infrastructure to become the superhighway to deploy some of these new AI workloads and factories.”

Cisco and Equinix have partnered around Cisco deployment of virtual licenses on Equinix Network Edge, which helps form Equinix’s Virtual Network Functions, said Dale Tucker, the company’s senior director of technology alliances.

“This really deepens it by moving into AI infrastructure and designing an ecosystem that allows partners and their customers to take advantage of everything that’s required to move from a testing environment to production AI,” Tucker said. “That requires secure networking, data access, and cloud adjacency, with Equinix giving customers a neutral interconnected environment to bring all that together, and so it really builds effectively on what Cisco and Equinix have been doing together for years.”

Equinix sees the future as based on an ecosystem of different partners coming together to help deploy production-grade AI, Mackintosh said.

It’s really that purpose-built AI ecosystem with the likes of Cisco, Dell, HPE, and Nvidia that’s our differentiation,” he said. “That, combined with proximity on-ramps into clouds and neoclouds is why we’re bringing the full ecosystem together in one neutral landing zone to enable networks of the future.”

Going forward, Equinix will continue to deepen the partner experience and engagement, Mackintosh said.

“We’ll focus around enablement to ensure that the three companies’ sales forces are jointly enabled along with partners like Presidio for partnering around joint demand creation,” he said. “With Equinix’s digital infrastructure and purpose-built ecosystem, we feel we’re in a fantastic position to capture all the opportunity in the market.”

Currently, about 25 percent to 30 percent of Equinix’s business comes from indirect channels, and that part of the business is growing as the company looks to invest in its partner business, Mackintosh said.

Mackintosh said part of that investment was his own appointment as Equinix channel leader as well as elevating that position in the company, reporting into the company’s chief revenue officer, “as well as future investments that we’ll be making to drive increased partner profitability, deepening some of the relationships in the channel,” he said. “We’re also having a hyper focus on ease of doing business for our extended ecosystem.”

Mackintosh joined Equinix in January after over six years leading the partner business at Juniper Networks and, before that, spent four years leading the partner business at Extreme Networks.

Demand for AI-ready infrastructure is accelerating quickly, said Scott Sawyer, vice president of sales Northeast at Avant Communications, a Chicago-based technology services distributor.

“In such a rapidly evolving landscape, customers need confidence that they are building on proven platforms with experienced providers,” Sawyer told CRN via email. “Equinix and Presidio are longstanding partners of Avant, and we are confident that this collaboration will ultimately help enterprises evaluate, deploy, and scale AI with greater speed, security and certainty.”