Equinix makes mild debut on stock market

Equinix, a provider of carrier-neutral collocation space and related Internet services, on Friday went public with a mild bounce in its stock.

The Redwood City, Calif., company, which had attracted a gold-plated list of early investors including AOL, Cisco and Microsoft, priced its offering at $12 and ended Nasdaq trading at $13.125. The stock traded in a narrow range all day, rising no higher than $14.

The initial public offering, under the symbol EQIX, was led by Goldman Sachs and Salomon Smith Barney. It raised $240 million for Equinix.

Equinix builds what it calls neutral Internet Business Exchange (IBX) centers. Like several other new firms, Equinix offers ISPs, ASPs, content providers and Web-centric enterprises the opportunity to buy hosting space with access to several backbone providers' networks.

But Equinix portrays its mission as somewhat broader than simply neutral collocation. It also touts pushing its clients' content to multiple locations at the network edge so end users can download from relatively nearby servers. In addition, Equinix IBX sites offer enhanced data backup services, tariff-free interconnections among backbone providers, and a general meeting point for specialized performance-management vendors hired by Web hosting customers.

Currently open Equinix centers are located in the areas of New York, Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley. But the company plans a $1.2 billion construction program in partnership with construction engineering giant Bechtel.

Just last month, in a move typical of pre-IPO companies, Equinix made two key board appointments. One was Scott Kriens, CEO of optical routing powerhouse Juniper Networks. The other was Dawn Lepore, CIO of stock-trading kingpin Charles Schwab.

Though the Equinix debut was not a barnburner, it came on a day where several other companies, including semiconductor device maker Intrinsix, postponed their IPOs. Following a recent trend, the hottest IPOs Friday were from three biotechnology firms.