Equinix Buys Cloud Professional Services Firm Nimbo

Equinix, a Redwood City, California-based global colocation and interconnection giant, has acquired Nimbo, a professional services company that helps enterprises make the jump from legacy IT to modern infrastructure.

Nimbo’s expertise includes things like moving legacy business applications from being hosted strictly in the customer’s own data centers to a more agile hybrid infrastructure that combines their data centers with cloud services. The New York-based company is a certified Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure partner.

Acquisition price has not been disclosed.

For Equinix, which since the start of the year has been operating as a real estate investment trust, the deal is a step in a broader initiative to build out its professional services capabilities. The company wants to be able to support customer data center migrations, help them set up modern, optimized WANs, and build hybrid infrastructure for their applications.

Cloud services and their rising popularity with users have been a major growth driver for Equinix. The company’s role isn’t that of a cloud provider, however. Its data centers act as points where customers can easily connect to a multitude of providers.

Equinix has traditionally placed focus on enabling interconnection between service providers and end users in its facilities. That, combined with a massive global footprint and a huge amount of customers, has made its data centers very effective hubs for accessing cloud services.

Recently, Equinix has been investing in technological capabilities to enable this exchange of services at a more sophisticated level via a platform called the Equinix Cloud Exchange. The platform enables on-demand secure connections to participating cloud providers, including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM SoftLayer, among others. Users can connect to as many service providers as they need through virtual circuits on a single physical port.

With Nimbo’s cloud professional services capabilities, Equinix will be able to not only provide the platform to connect to cloud providers but also to help the customer figure out which providers and what kind of an architecture is best for them and their applications.

Pete Hayes, chief sales officer at Equinix, said Nimbo had numerous Fortune 100 companies on its customer roster. “With our acquisition of Nimbo, we have expanded our ability to help customers leverage our unique cloud-density and Cloud Exchange value propositions and assist with the design and deployment of hybrid cloud solutions,” he said in a statement.