Equinix: How do you see what's on the farm? Stand on the barn.

Datacentre, data center, collocation, colo, bit-barn. Whatever you call them, they are where you really live. Your entire digital life and work is there. Every bit that you touch, touches them. Even if just passing through everything we do, lives there. They put a great deal of effort into keeping computer and network gear cool, safe, and your free Amazon Dot on the Internet. (My kids spent the weekend with Alexa.)

There are many data center companies, mostly Real Estate Investment Trusts, but one of the largest is Equinix. So if you want to see the future, they see it first.

Their quarterly financials detailed very interesting figures on how acquiring the 29 strategic Terremark facilities from Verizon affected their mix.

What is buried in the back of the deck is what I like to see; business strategy. The tidbits I picked up on this time is that most of their 9,500 customers are all over the world with them. Nearly 85% have racks in more than one of their buildings. Before you dismiss all of them as Cloudy Telecoms or Fortune 500, think again. That still leaves 9,000 other customers. They already have 182 data centers in 44 metros with 27 expansions in progress this quarter.

Their largest customer is actually an enterprise, not Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

Of course as a group, IT/Cloud operators are their biggest billers, but the next largest are network operators.

These places aren't cheap. Equinix is known as one of the most expensive places to just put your gear and hook it up, so why is so much stuff here? It's the networks. If an Internet backbone operator or telecom of any stripe wants to be relevant, they need to be present in their "IBX." If you want to connect your company to the biggest or most niche service provider, you have to go here. If you physically are only present in Asia, you can place servers and content all over Europe and the Americas, without people. The real value is that you can connect locally with everyone.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Digital Realty Trust or the dozen or so data center operators of scale. Also, the hundreds of value-added colocation facilities that do much more than keep it cool and the lights on. The managed services on top of colo can be the difference between keeping up or killing your stuff.

Which server farm still boils down to the network question: "can you get there from here?" Superhighways or washed out dirt-roads, your choice.