Verizon to Resell Equinix Data Center Services

Verizon will resell Equinix interconnection and colocation services, bundling them with its own enterprise offerings, the companies announced Thursday. The partnership comes about five months after Equinix agreed to buy a large data center portfolio from Verizon for $3.6 billion.

The partnership is targeting demand for enterprise cloud services. Equinix provides direct connectivity to the largest cloud providers from its data centers around the world, and Verizon expects to sell enterprise customers solutions that interconnect their on-premise IT infrastructure with cloud services through Equinix.

“This agreement provides customers with fully-integrated network, security, and data center services designed to support their IT transformation,” Jim Duncan, VP of global advanced solutions for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said in a statement. “Our network provides IT continuity across current and future IT strategies – cloud migrations and the like – and Equinix provides an interconnection point to leading cloud platforms for that transformation.”

See also: Why Equinix is Buying Verizon's Data Centers for $3.6B

The announcement illustrates that while the big telcos have decided that owning and operating global fleets of data centers was not where they want to be sinking resources, the ability to provide a wide variety of technology infrastructure services to their enterprise customer – including data center space – remains important.

CenturyLink, another major telco that recently sold nearly all its data center assets, continues providing colocation and other services hosted in those facilities, itself becoming a customer of Cyxtera, the data center provider formed by the group of private equity investors that bought the $2.2 billion asset portfolio.

Read more: Here's What's Next for CenturyLink's Data Center Business