Equinix helps Aconex to expand its global offering with increased reliability and stability benefits

Aconex is the world’s largest provider of online document management and collaboration systems to the construction and engineering industries. With more than 160,000 global users and projects totalling a combined value of £100 billion worldwide, Aconex works with customers to manage the complex and heavy flow of project information through one central online platform.  This enables project participants to view, track and share their files in real-time, at any time and from any location – streamlining collaboration between team members and providing more control over procedures therefore cutting risks such as information loss, disputes and delays. 

Aconex has consistently been at the forefront of its sector, working on projects such as Wembley Stadium, Westfield White City and McDonald’s Restaurants in the UK as well as the $40 billion commercial development of Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.

With the expansion of its business in both developed and emerging markets worldwide, Aconex has experienced considerable and rapid growth.  With customer numbers doubling each year, and with the volume of customer data being stored and processed increasing, the company started to experience reliability and performance issues with their existing data centre provider. 

The Solution
Aware that its current data centre provider would not be able to support its continued growth, and conscious of the particular needs of its European business, Aconex decided to explore the benefits of outsourcing to a data centre services provider in London.

As David Chatterton, chief technology officer at Aconex, comments:  “As we have grown and developed as a company, our customer base has expanded significantly, seeing an increased volume in customer projects – and subsequently the level of data accessed through our online platform. 

“Although both reliability and stability were paramount to our decision to colocate with a data centre services provider, the key to our decision rested with the provider’s capacity for growth.  As our previous solution had limited bandwidth, and was unable to maintain the first-rate performance our customers require, we needed a solution that could cope with our growth.” 

Aconex began assessing firms in March 2008, and started using the Equinix service in July. “Most companies could only meet one or two of our requirements, but Equinix was able to provide all three: capacity, reliability and stability,” continued Chatterton.  “As we were already successfully using Equinix’s Asia Pacific data centres, we also knew the way they worked and were comfortable that their standards would meet our expectations.”

Benefits
Equinix offered Aconex a colocation service that would easily scale to meet the company’s capacity requirements.  With tens of thousands of users located in Europe and Africa relying on the performance of the Equinix solution, Aconex wanted to ensure first rate reliability and performance with dedicated redundant internet bandwidth.

“Since colocating at Equinix’s London data centre last July, Equinix’s service and capacity has been successfully supporting our continued growth.  Reliability is key - we’ve found the failure instance has been zero, enabling our growing customer base to continue accessing project data at anytime, anywhere, without any performance issues,” said Chatterton. 
Another advantage of the Equinix solution has been the high level of security offered.  “A high level security offering is important for our customers, as essentially we are storing their – often highly confidential – data on our platform.  As a result, we demand best-in-class security and with Equinix we’ve obtained the high level we expected,” said Chatterton.
As Aconex continues to expand its European business, it needs a data centre services provider that can support its position in the market as the global industry standard.  With Equinix’s large global footprint and continued expansion plan, it is well placed to meet Aconex’s growth as it continues to expand geographically.