Stewart Orrell is senior director, global enterprise at Equinix
What were the major themes of your business in 2014?
With the publication of Flash Boys, high-frequency trading went from being something that was an industry initiative to something that was quite high profile. That obviously impacted clients. I think we were very lucky in that respect because people wanted to stick with a trusted entity and we were well positioned to offer to our clients the strength and diversity of the ecosystems that we run.
Another thing we saw was consolidation. Over the past five years, people have been deployed in many different sites to be close to the various exchanges or service providers or counterparties, and what we really saw last year was a consolidation, where the client didn’t necessarily have less infrastructure, but wanted to consolidate in a fewer number of sites.
What are your expectations for 2015?
I think that consolidation will continue. One thing we did start to see throughout the year and we expect it to accelerate in 2015 is people really looking at which applications are suitable to be in those ecosystem sites. Things like risk and analytics that have been traditionally been static systems of record are becoming more systems of engagement for use of information, whether it's historical information or Twitter sentiment. Using data in a more real time fashion drives a lot more performance requirements around how you set up your systems and what you have at the edge as opposed to in the core. We really see that as a big progression for next year. We've got a lot of conversations already in motion that we expect to see in 2015.
We have our TR2 site opening in Toronto and we're very excited about that market. We feel we've got a very good business going up there and we've got a lot of demand going in that market. The second thing is in New York we have NY6 site coming online. We call that our ‘business suite’ offering. For people who are consolidating lots of infrastructure and that made me want to manage it in a slightly different way, NY6 will cater to that. It’s a slightly different take on our traditional model.