There’s something to be said for consistency through good times and bad, and one company that has had a staggeringly consistent track record is international data center vendor, Equinix. It just recorded its 69th straight positive quarter, according to the company.
That’s an astonishing record, and covers over 17 years of positive returns. That means this streak goes back to 2003. Not too shabby.
The company had a decent quarter, too. Even in the middle of an economic mess, it was still up 6% YoY to $1.445 billion and up 2% over last quarter. The company runs data centers where companies can rent space for their servers. Equinix handles all of the infrastructure providing racks, wiring and cooling — and customers can purchase as many racks as they need.
If you’re managing your own servers for even part of your workload, it can be much more cost-effective to rent space from a vendor like Equinix than trying to run a facility on your own.
Among its new customers this quarter are Zoom, which is buying capacity all over the place, having also announced a partnership with Oracle earlier this month, and TikTok. Both of those companies deal in video and require lots of different types of resources to keep things running.
This report comes against a backdrop of a huge increase in resource demand for certain sectors like streaming video and video conferencing, with millions of people working and studying at home or looking for distractions.
And if you’re wondering if they can keep it going, they believe they can. Their guidance calls for 2020 revenue of $5.877-$5.985 billion, a 6-8% increase over the previous year.
You could call them the anti-IBM. At one point Big Blue recorded 22 straight quarters of declining revenue in an ignominious streak that stretched from 2012 to 2018 before it found a way to stop the bleeding.
When you consider that Equnix’s streak includes the period of 2008-2010, the last time the economy hit the skids, it makes the record even more impressive, and certainly one worth pointing out.