Equinix, Inc. has announced that it has been awarded the 2013 Frost & Sullivan United States Retail Co-location Services Market Share Leadership Award. Equinix was specifically recognized for its excellence in capturing the highest market share within its industry.

“Equinix is honored to be recognized by Frost & Sullivan for this very special award. From day one, Equinix’s value proposition was based on the simple idea of enabling companies to accelerate growth by directly connecting to customers and partners in our data centers and this still holds true today. We are committed to building on our market leadership by innovating and exploring new ways to deliver business value to our customers and helping them leverage the unique capabilities of Platform Equinix in 31 markets across the globe,” said Charles Meyers, chief operating officer, Equinix.

Equinix was awarded the 2013 United States Retail Co-location Services Market Share Leadership Award based on four key criteria: 1.) achieving a market leading position based on revenues, 2.) investing in colocation facilities in strategic locations, 3.) assembling leading carriers to interconnect at these co-location facilities and, 4.) offering superior infrastructure, power and network performance. Equinix held first position, in terms of revenue share (based on full year 2012 revenues), in the U.S. Retail Co-location services market, with a revenue share of 21.9%.

Equinix is experiencing high demand for its data center and interconnection services in the United States from financial services firms and cloud service providers, as well as network services providers and content and digital media companies. At the end of 2012, Equinix had more than 2,000 customers in North America. Equinix has established vast business ecosystems enablingcompanies todirectly connect with their customers and partners to improve application performance, generate new revenue opportunities, and accelerate their digital supply chain.

In a report issued with the award, Frost & Sullivan cites that demand from other customer segments — particularly hosted service providers and cloud service providers — is also contributing to steady growth in co-location revenues. In particular, cloud computing services are appealing to global enterprises who seek to off-load IT workloads. Equinix enables these global enterprises to shift capital infrastructure costs to an operating expense, aggregating or distributing data center footprint as needed and using low-cost cross connects to reach application and cloud service providers.

Equinix operates a broad footprint of over 95 data centers in 31 markets across the globe. Year to date, Equinix has opened two additional data center facilities in the U.S. — in March it opened its second International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) in Seattle (SE3) and its eighth facility in Ashburn (DC11) which services the Washington D.C. metro area. The Ashburn data center campus continues to be of great strategic importance for the company, as it represents one of the largest Internet exchange points in the world.

The Frost & Sullivan report also notes that the reliability of the infrastructure — data center, power, and network connections — is of utmost importance at co-location facilities, as downtime can mean lost business opportunities for customers and may violate service level agreements. Equinix’s facilities offer advanced design, security, power and cooling elements to provide customers with a high level of reliability. The company’s power infrastructure delivered greater than 99.999% uptime globally in 2012.

2012 represented a strong year for business growth and industry recognition for Equinix. The company was ranked number 271 fastest growing company in North America on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, ranked in the top 50 in the InformationWeek 500 and in December it was named to the prestigious NASDAQ-100 Index. This momentum has carried into 2013, as Forbes recently named Equinix number 15 in its list of America's Fastest Growing Tech Companies 2013.

To download a free copy of the Frost & Sullivan report, click here.