This week we are celebrating EvoSwitch’s 10th birthday. It’s amazing to think how much has happened in that decade. So, as we prepare to party, I thought I would spend a moment looking back at some of the highlights of our journey.

Eric Boonstra, CEO

  • 2007: EvoSwitch opened the first carbon and carrier-neutral tier 3+ data center in the Netherlands, powered by 100% green energy.
  • 2008: major growth in Dutch and international customers, attracted by EvoSwitch’s location, service portfolio and  24/7 personal support.
  • 2009: EvoSwitch gave in-kind sponsorship to the Wikimedia Foundation, becoming the European hub for Wikipedia.
  • 2010: As customer demand grew, we announced plans for a major expansion, doubling the size of the AMS1 datacenter, with a new energy efficient architecture to ensure constant improvements in energy efficiency.
  • 2012: We went transatlantic, opening a new colocation facility in Northern Virginia, in one of the world’s busiest interconnection hubs.
  • 2013: We were given AMS-IX Gold Partner status this year. To qualify as an AMS-IX Gold Partner, companies have to introduce significant numbers of new members or 100GE (Gigabit Ethernet) of new port capacity. We have been AMS-IX Gold Partners every year since.
  • 2015: In the autumn of 2015 we launched OpenCloud, our cloud-neutral platform and marketplace for service providers and enterprises. Nearly half of our customers have now signed up.
  • 2016: AMS-IX traffic at EvoSwitch AMS1 broke the 500 Gigabits per second threshold, putting us in the top tier of interconnection hubs in the region. Much more importantly, I am very proud that our customer satisfaction levels, expressed as NPS (Net Promotor Scores), moved up to +75 this year after year-on-year growth.
  • 2017: In June we were given the ‘Best Energy Solution’ award at Datacloud Europe in Monaco, an exciting public recognition that we’re on the right track with our sustainable design and engineering innovations. We also announced plans to build a new datacenter on the campus in Amsterdam. After a decade of growth we need more space to service our many customers for the years to come.

We offer next generation data centers, so we spend most of our time looking forward. But now and then it’s useful to look back, and we have come a long way together, from a single dataroom in Haarlem to a well-respected and fast-growing transatlantic business with more than 55 connectivity providers, and over 250 satisfied customers.

I would like to take this opportunity to give a big thank you to everyone who has made all this progress possible – our staff, our partners and, of course, our customers.

Thank you all for all your dedication, your ideas and your support. And there is much more to come, so here’s to the next decade!

Eric Boonstra is the CEO of EvoSwitch. His focus on attracting international customers to EvoSwitch has been helped by his multi-sectoral experience, which includes senior management roles in Siemens, Staples and ABN AMRO View full bio.