EdgeConneX® has announced the launch of its Portland Edge Data Center® Cloud Ecosystem with industry leaders including Ciena, Electric Lightwave, Megaport, Opus Interactive, and ScienceLogic. The ecosystem provides EdgeConneX customers with on-demand, direct access to top cloud providers, the latest interconnection, infrastructure monitoring and performance measurement, as well as network access and managed services solutions. These partners enable customers to launch, manage and grow private, hybrid and public cloud environments with ease within a secure and reliable Edge Data Center environment. EdgeConneX also offers direct connectivity to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect in its Portland Edge Data Center.

EdgeConneX's ecosystem partnership with Megaport allows customers to access the company's SDN-enabled elastic interconnection fabric that enables direct, seamless connectivity to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform via an Application Program Interface (API). Opus Interactive aids EdgeConneX enterprise customers in their migration to the cloud, while managing their cloud infrastructure ongoing. ScienceLogic provides IT infrastructure monitoring and performance measurement services, assisting CIOs in the management of their infrastructure on a single pane of glass, no matter where the infrastructure may reside -- on premises, in colocation, or in the cloud. Electric Lightwave is the largest regional fiber provider in the west, offering network access to the cloud and private connectivity options that provide greater cloud security and lower latency for customers. Ciena is a market leader in creating customized solutions that assist customers in the management of complex optical and Ethernet technologies. These collective partnerships, along with others underway, position the Portland Edge Data Center as the region's most prominent cloud hub and the only way in which to locally reach AWS Direct Connect and Azure by Microsoft.

To celebrate the first ecosystem of its kind in a major metro market outside of the nine major peering locations across the U.S., EdgeConneX is hosting an event on Thursday, May 19, at the leftbank annex in Portland from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. (please RSVP here). The company welcomes the attendance of those in the greater Portland / Hillsboro metro area that are eager to learn about when to take their business to the cloud.

"With the launch of the cloud ecosystem in our Portland Edge Data Center, EdgeConneX is making it easier for customers to reach the cloud and take advantage of industry-leading cloud technologies that will build and support a comprehensive cloud solution, all in one secure edge location," states Clint Heiden, chief commercial officer, EdgeConneX. "In five short years, cloud traffic will escalate to unprecedented levels, making access to innovative cloud service providers and partners a vital component to realizing a company's strategic and commercial objectives."

The move toward pushing content and information closer to the edge of the network is one that has been predicted by many industry experts. Specifically, in a report titled "The Edge Manifesto: Digital Business, Rich Media, Latency Sensitivity and the Use of Distributed Data Centers" (July 2015), Gartner analyst Bob Gill predicted that "the topology of networked data centers will move over the next five years from a centralized, 'mega data center' approach, to one augmented by multiple, smaller, distributed sources of content and information."