While large infrastructure providers make organizations susceptible to product and pricing changes, NetActuate’s partnership model offers flexibility and consistency, working with your current technology stack instead of adding more complexity.
Vendor lock-in arises when customers rely on a product, infrastructure, or service and face significant challenges transitioning to a competitor’s offering. Single-vendor strategies often exacerbate this issue by creating excessive reliance on the provider’s product strategy and pricing changes. This limits customer choices and reduces their ability to secure the best value for their investment.
For example, in November 2024, Equinix announced their decision to sunset their bare metal offering, which now forces customers to migrate their workloads to an equivalent service. This follows only four years after their 2020 acquisition of Packet, which has been rebranded as Equinix Metal. In Equinix’s portfolio, compute was another channel that would facilitate the consumption of core products – colocation. This is in line with Equinix’s Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) business model.
The decision to sunset the Metal service reflects their focus on hyperscaler campuses and investing more in a select number of data centers rather than on smaller and geographically distributed locations. This is because “the average size of the deals that we’re seeing today are much larger”, and also because hyperscalers are consumers of colocation services and do not need to rely on third-party bare metal services.
Even if large infrastructure providers have the capacity to scale up and host all your services on their platform, a single-vendor strategy is inherently risky and poses a significant number of challenges due to dependency on a single vendor.
This means that businesses are vulnerable to choices made by their providers with respect to product and strategy changes, pricing hikes and licensing changes. Equinix bare metal customers whose services are being sunset, now need to migrate their services to ensure business continuity. Those that have only used the Equinix platform now need to find, procure, train staff, architect, and migrate their workloads to the new provider.
Pricing increases are also a common occurrence, such as the 2022 hike for Equinix Metal, or marked-up costs associated with supply chain factors, which includes a three-fold increase in energy pricing by Equinix from early 2024.
Other examples of large provider limitations include T-shirt sizing and whole-rack increments that can lead to inflexible pricing, minor remote hands operation requiring very precise details and checks they were done correctly, and long processes for provisioning new services and escalations.
The NetActuate Partnership Difference
NetActuate stands out from other infrastructure service providers through a partnership-first strategy, where we align with our customers’ objectives rather than simply responding to service requests. You can find out more about our engagement model in this article.
Just as we partner with our customers, we also have deep partnerships with other service providers and support our customers in running their infrastructure and services across different operators.
Other providers may be interested in helping you completely migrate away from third-party providers. NetActuate’s strategy is to architect and manage the solution that makes the most sense for you, such as continuing to use Equinix services and only migrate the compute workloads to NetActuate.
For example, Equinix customers can move their Metal workload to NetActuate and continue using the rest of their existing Equinix services, such as IX ports, colocation, direct connects into public cloud providers, and even facilitate metro cross connects and transport between sites.
Not only that, but NetActuate also provides managed services for third-party services, so customers can have a single management layer across multiple infrastructure service providers.
Technology agnostic
To further reduce lock-in risks and meet customers where they’re at, the NetActuate solutions are built on the concepts of interoperability and flexibility. Besides helping operate customer infrastructure across different providers, NetActuate’s services are flexible by design and make use of a range of open source technologies.
- Customers can run your edge services on their choice of standard commodity hardware, custom FPGAs, GPUs, SANs, network gear, and terrestrial systems. These are procured, configured and can be managed by NetActuate.
- Choice of Linux distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Gentoo
- Choice of BSD operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD
- Open source networking software, such as VyOS
Conclusion
NetActuate is the trusted infrastructure partner for the world’s most ambitious digital innovators. Our network, cloud, services, and team help our customers’ products take flight. Knowing our lane and staying in it has been a cornerstone of our success. Like the BASF ads of the 1990s, NetActuate doesn’t make the CDN, we make it available in more markets. We don’t make the DNS filtering service, we make it more reliable. And we don’t make the developer platform, we make it faster. By focusing on what we do best—innovative infrastructure and networking solutions—we empower your services to shine.