Zac Smith of Packet recently introduced me to an entire market I hadn't realized existed: the massive "private clouds" being built by company after company. I had assumed most cloud needs would be well served by the giants, Amazon, Google, ... They have the scale to keep prices low and tens of thousands of engineers ensuring their technology is better than almost everyone else.

Packet is doing very well and has strong products and a growing customer base. Equinix, a $50 billion company, presumably paid a generous price. Equinix's P/E ratio of ~100 requires rapid and profitable growth. Packet can deliver that, initially by serving Equinix's existing customer base.

Packet can deploy private networks for Equinix clients in weeks across a dozen data centers worldwide. Perhaps more interesting is Packet's ability to extend Equinix from the data center to inside carrier networks, towers, and ultimately customer sites. All of that is part of today's Edge design, also called a hybrid cloud. Packet is already there.

Zac is selling "bare metal servers" in large numbers to companies that had particular needs or security concerns the big outfits couldn't meet. Call Packet, and in days or weeks you can have 100's of Linux servers installed almost anywhere in the developed world, ready to go and well configured with software. More