Why Telecity added Microsoft Office365 ?

Conclusion

The announcement around Office365 availability through ExpressRoute is just one step on a much longer strategic path for Telecity. While Cloud-IX is replicated by other vendors it does deliver the connectivity that reduces the amount of private circuits customers need to purchase. As these circuits are shared there is no long term commitment which makes going through companies such as Telecity an interesting option for those businesses who do not want to commit to long term contracts.

At the moment those SaaS connections are few though, and it is disappointing that Salesforce is not closer. In fact Microsoft may steal a march on its rival if it can deliver Dynamics 2016 over Expressroute shortly. At the moment the main connections being delivered appear to be to IaaS and PaaS providers such as Azure, AWS, iland and Zadara. As Telecity brings more of its supply side live it will have a more interesting offering, that should enable people to move between suppliers if they wish to.  Moving between Office365 and Google Apps (when it becomes available) is something that won’t be done quickly. Perhaps as they add providers such iland this will help to commoditise those markets further.

Adi explained the Telecity approach to this with the following comment:

“We are building out the supply side ecosystem based on the use cases and the workloads that our end customers want to deploy and integrate. Once we complete the engineering for one of these services then these services become available across all of the Cloud-IX platforms across the whole of EMEA”

How Telecity seek to differentiate itself may become a moot point in a few months when the acquisition by Equinix goes through and Cloud-IX becomes merged with Cloud Exchange. What is interesting is that both companies appear to be following similar paths. Equinix was one of the other companies announcing availability of Office365 over ExpressRoute. Perhaps it is because of these synergies that the Interoute merger was canned and Equinix became the white knight.

We left the last word with Adi, explaining why customers should be considering Telecity at the moment:

 “Our customers typically need to integrate multiple services from multiple service providers and what Cloud-IX makes available is the back end integration with the different cloud service providers. Whether it is an Azure instance with Office365 or whether it’s a storage service with a public cloud compute service.

“Cloud-IX takes out of the equation the cost and the network integration complexity for our end customers and because it’s built on a layer 3 network underneath, the orchestration platform is more robust and resilient and is better suited to mission critical and hybrid use cases.

“What that essentially means is that the customer experiences are better because customers do not need to be networking gurus in the course of deploying and integrating public clouds services with their on-premises IT.”