250 Verizon Data Center Employees to Join Equinix

Equinix is planning to bring on more than 250 Verizon employees once its blockbuster $3.6 billion acquisition of 29 Verizon data centers is closed.

Most Verizon employees expected to join the Redwood City, California-based data center provider are in operations, Equinix CEO Stephen Smith said on the company’s earnings call Wednesday. “To support these newly acquired sites and sectors, we expect to bring on over 250 Verizon employees, primarily in operations, and are excited to welcome these new colleagues to the Equinix family,” he said.

Smith said the company expects to close the transaction “shortly.”

The companies announced the deal late last year. The 29 Verizon data centers are located on 24 sites, most of them in the US, with the exception of one site in Bogotá and one in São Paulo.

Read more: Why Equinix is Buying Verizon Data Centers for $3.6B

As an early integration step, in the 12 metros where Equinix’s current footprint overlaps with the Verizon portfolio it is buying, the company plans to tether the assets, Smith said. That means it will link Equinix and Verizon data centers via a single wide area network in each of the metros.

This is a common approach by data center providers that own several sites in a metro. This way, customers in one location in a region can easily reach partners or customers in another, set up redundant infrastructure across multiple locations, or simply treat one location as an extension of another.

Verizon has been a major Equinix customer since before the deal and plans to continue providing a variety of enterprise services hosted in Equinix data centers, bundling them with the data center provider’s colocation services, and acting as an Equinix reseller. Once the acquisition is closed, Verizon will become one of Equinix’s largest customers, Smith said.

Equinix reported $950 million for the first quarter, up from $845 million in same period last year. Its net income for the quarter was $42 million, up from a $37 million loss reported in the first quarter of 2016 but down from $61.7 million in income reported for the fourth quarter of last year.