Here’s how Equinix completes Tech Data’s data center offerings

For Tech Data, when they signed up with Equinix for the partnership, it actually helps them to complete the sales cycle or the end-to-end offerings in the data center.

While Equinix remains focused on its data center expansion plans in the Southeast Asian region, the largest global data center and colocation provider for enterprise network and cloud computing is now looking to boost its offering through its partnership with Tech Data in the region.

In an interview with Rajaneesh Kurup, Director of Technical Sales, Platform Alliances and Channel for Asia Pacific at Equinix during Tech Data’s Momentum 2025 event, he shared how Equinix is relying on Tech Data’s ecosystem to reach out to more customers in the region, especially with the increasing demand for stronger network connectivity with increasing use of AI.

“We have been investing a lot on our channel side of the business. With Tech Data as one of our key partners, we get that better reach to customers. They play an important role and their network, in terms of the MSPs, is going to be a huge aspect in terms of providing that end-to-end solution for the customers. This is definitely what we are relying on from our partnership perspective,” said Kurup.

Kurup pointed out that this part of Equinix’s business has been growing significantly and they have witnessed the evolution, from the direct business to the channel. He believes this is primarily because customers are not going to buy components or blocks and pieces of the solution.

“They need that end-to-end solution or somebody who can bring that together. So that's where we see that the channel business plays a very, very important role. Now, from an Equinix perspective, when you look at how these deals are ending up, these are bigger deals through partners, because again, they are able to extract more value out of the platform for the end customers, compared to a point conversation that we could have,” added Kurup.

Kurup explained that the Equinix platform from a data center also has connectivity solutions as part of the overall portfolio. What makes it interesting is that Tech Data can stack that up as an end-to-end solution, together with Equinix’s tech partners as well, be it the likes of Dell or HP, and so on.

“If you look at those multiple layers, from a partnership point of view, that end-to-end solution can be provided by Tech Data which is that whole ecosystem of solutions. And one of the key elements would also be making sure that our partner understands our solutions and what we are offering. So, there is definitely investment in terms of enabling the team when we are having joint solutions. And it's also intermingling the teams as well, when you think about our sales team and Tech Data sales team as well, as well as extending beyond Tech Data to their MSP network as well,” said Kurup.

The importance of partners

For Kurup, partners play a very important role because they see what is happening within the industry. He believes that partners have got a lot more experience working with different customers across, not only within the region, but across the globe. Hence, they can always bring in that best practice.

“So, the time to value is actually a lot more quicker when working with a partner versus organizations trying to address it by themselves. So definitely that is one element in terms of the challenges. And also sometimes even assessing different products and solutions to get that right fit. Sometimes they do not know what they do not know. So that is where the partners play a very, very important role as well, in terms of helping them pick the right solution to meet their business needs and take them on that journey,” said Kurup.

At the same time, Kurup pointed out that not all customers would be at the same level in terms of adoption.

“If you look at our 10,000 odd customers, we see these patterns in terms of how the leaders in the industry are adopting the platform versus the laggards, especially on how enterprises have been evolving their infrastructure design from a centralized architecture to a more distributed architecture. More enterprises are now designing their infrastructure like service providers. They are not running one or two data centers centrally and trying to address everything globally. They're getting it more and more distributed. And again, the world we live in is also adding more complexities to it. So more services are needed to be leveraged over digital platform. All of that is driving more distribution of their infrastructure. They are also evolving how they are designing it,” added Kurup.

Partnership with Tech Data

For Lynn Toh, Senior Director - Advanced Solutions at Tech Data, when they signed up with Equinix for the partnership, it actually helps them to complete that sales cycle or that end-to-end offerings.

“We are continuously trying to train our partners with the help from Equinix as well training the partners, educating them how to complete that cycle itself. And of course, at the same time, for us to bring a lot more values to the partners, we actually pair them up with what our other vendors are doing. So when we launched the Equinix partnership, we actually launched it together with Dell, with Vertiv, with any of the data centers vendors that we are providing. So that's where the educational part of the partners itself is very important,” said Toh.

Interestingly, Toh also mentioned that the partnership with Equinix is not much different to the other partnerships they have.

“We want to make sure that the set of partners or the ecosystems that Equinix currently has can fit into the solutions or vice versa. So, we don't want to treat them as a different vendor compared to our data centers partner. We want the Equinix part to be complete in the whole sales cycle. We treat Equinix the same as how we actually will go to market together with our data centers vendor. So in that way, the partners will see that stickiness as well as that completeness among the whole solution itself, then that's for sure, it will be an easier way route to market for sure,” explained Toh.

Toh also highlighted that that Tech Data has been working very closely in the last one year. Moving forward, she hopes to keep the momentum going with Equinix.

“We continue to explore what kind of use cases, what kind of solutions that we can put together and who we can work with within our own vendor ecosystem to go to the market together as a closed circle. We are seeing a lot of AI take-ups for sure. So AI is driving, and AI is a key growth factor for Industry 4.0. And as AI projects take up, the power increases and everything and that's where Equinix plays the best. Previously when we don't have that portfolio, we will always have to just leave it there. But now with that, we will complete the sales again,” concluded Toh.