OREANDA-NEWS. Equinix is excited to announce we’ve joined the elite Stanford Platform Lab, a group of leading researchers and companies committed to building the technology platforms that will enable the next generation of applications.

The founders of the lab, based at Stanford University, recognized that the applications transforming how we work and interact wouldn’t be possible without equally transformative collections of new platforms. The lab is focused in particular on developing platforms that enable smart objects, mobile interconnection, the Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed cloud workloads.

Equinix has always been about innovation, interconnection and collaboration, so the Stanford Platform Lab’s mission meshes well with our own. We want to encourage innovation around the anytime, anywhere, any device interconnection that helps the enterprise execute hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and IoT deployments.

Being part of the lab also means we can also tap into some of Silicon Valley’s best resources and minds as we share our own interconnection and data center expertise: Facebook, Google, Cisco, and VMware are among the companies that have also joined the lab. 

In a white paper released to coincide with its March 2015 founding, the Stanford Platform Lab defined new platforms as “general-purpose substrates that simplify the creation of higher-level platforms and applications.”

It also listed some examples of platforms created since the year 2000, including Hadoop (a large-scale storage system), MapReduce (a computational model) and Django (a development framework), as well as virtual machines and new approaches to networking, such as software-defined networks.

But the lab made sure to note, “The revolution is not over,” since new generations of platforms are needed to enable new generations of applications. Of the domains the paper said were ripe for the creation of new platforms, one was of particular interest to us – the low-latency data center:

“Little has been done to take advantage of the sub-microsecond speed-of-light distance between machines in a datacenter,” the paper read. “The next big opportunity in datacenters is around latency: building new hardware and software platforms that operate at microsecond-scale latencies.”

Equinix already has extensive experience building low-latency ecosystems and offerings that are driven by proximate, direct and secure interconnections between partners and customers in our data centers. The Equinix Cloud Exchange, which connects customers to multiple cloud services instantly, simultaneously and on-demand from a single port, is just one example.

Our work with the lab begins amid massive projected growth in the number of connected objects. For instance, Gartner predicts more than 20 billion “things” will be connected to the Internet by 2020. New platforms and interconnection technologies will be needed to solve the data traffic and analytics issues related to this growth. As part of the Stanford Platform Lab, Equinix will help come up with the answers everyone is looking for, and we’re thrilled about that.