Equinix takes home Cloud Award for data center in inaugural SBR Technology Excellence Awards

Equinix earned the Cloud Award for the data center category in Singapore Business Review’s first Technology Excellence Awards.

With its exceptional Interconnection-First Approach, global interconnection and data center company Equinix has successfully enabled Easybook, Southeast Asia’s largest transportation booking services provider, to save up to 40 percent of cloud costs after migrating to a hybrid cloud infrastructure warranted by Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric™).

The said approach also earned Equinix the Cloud Award for the data center category in Singapore Business Review’s first Technology Excellence Awards.

Since its launch in 2006, Easybook has sold more than five million tickets on their website, gaining a reputable name as a one-stop transportation ticketing platform.

Despite their influence, Easybook’s former original IT infrastructure, which was based on a public approach, was beginning to show its limitations and was resulting in increasingly higher costs.

Easybook opted to use Equinix Performance Hub™ and ECX Fabric, which allowed them to address these issues and scale rapidly. Combining their ideas together with InfoFabrica, Equinix re-architectured Easybook’s IT platform and provided them a solution to meet the growing demands of the online travel industry.

With this, Easybook migrated the bulk of its operational architecture to a Performance Hub located within an Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centre in Singapore.

The Performance Hub allows Easybook to use its internal assets to drive performance whilst leveraging cloud service providers (CSP) via a private and secure connection, with Microsoft Azure Cloud as its key cloud provider.

Since customers are directly and privately connected to CSPs, consumers’ personal and financial information are ensured secure connectivity. ECX Fabric’s private connections bypass public internet, guaranteeing a high level of security in data transfer as well as low latency, thus creating a better end user experience.

By adopting a hybrid cloud approach, the booking platform can also install and control its key databases, applications and web portals on its own servers, whilst freeing IT staff to focus more on strategic activities, increasing efficiency and productivity as well as fostering business growth and delivering world-class customer experience.

With hybrid cloud, Easybook can directly connect to other CSPs within Equinix’s colocation facilities. This helps the online booking platform to remain quick-moving and ready to adopt new apps, technologies and innovations by tapping into multiple CSPs via ECX Fabric.

Furthermore, using ECX Fabric has warranted Easybook to deliver the automated, real-time provisioning of multiple CSPs, enabling it to quickly and efficiently leverage other CSPs in the future, improving both the company’s scalability and performance whilst controlling spiraling costs and dramatically reducing cloud service subscription costs by up to 40 percent.

Cost efficiencies aside, Equinix provided Easybook with a digital edge like no other, especially since Singapore’s tourism industry has been ecstatically thriving.

Singaporean tourism had a stellar performance with 18.5 million visitor arrivals in the Lion City. This number was 6.2 percent higher than the previous year, signalling a strong growth momentum for tourism not only for the present but also for the years to come.

As such, an increase in travellers in the city-state also raises the need for interconnection across the travel and hospitality industry, as this impacts the ways businesses, consumers and physical infrastructure interact with each other.

Recognising Singapore’s leading companies in technology innovation, the Technology Excellence Awards lauds outstanding companies that have pioneered groundbreaking IT products and solutions and implemented avant-garde technology initiatives that have made an impact on their business.

The Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review, was held on 30 May 2019 at the Conrad Centennial Singapore.

This year’s nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Cheang Wai Keat, Head of Advisory, Ernst & Young LLP; Darwin Thio, Director, Cybersecurity & Technology Services, Nexia TS; Daryl Pereira, Head of Cybersecurity, KPMG; Evelyn Lim, Executive Director, Tax Advisory, BDO LLP; and Jonathan Kok, Co-Head of Technology, Media & Communications Industry Group, RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP.

Check out the event photos during the awards night here.

If you would like to join the 2020 awards and be acclaimed for your company’s exceptional technology innovations, please email Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected]