Equinix Finalizes MainOne Integration, Employees Get New Contracts and Pay Bump
By Frank Eleanya and Ganiu Oloruntade, TechCabal
October 22, 2024
Equinix, the world’s largest global data center and colocation provider, has completed the post-acquisition integration of Nigeria’s MainOne following a $320 million acquisition in 2022.
Post-merger integrations combine and rearrange two entities’ assets, resources, and people to ensure that the efficiencies that motivated the merger/acquisition can be realized.
“Equinix is a 25-year-old business and publicly quoted. So there is a process they work with that we don’t apply here,” said a MainOne employee who asked not to be named so they could speak freely.
As part of that integration, employees received new employment contracts. While those contracts saw employees receive a pay bump, it was not as significant as they expected, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Those differences in expectations caused employees to delay signing the new contracts.
Another person with direct knowledge of the matter claimed the pay increase would only be reflected in March 2025, when the company closes its books for the year, and cited an internal survey that showed that a section of employees were unimpressed with their pay packages.
“What they are paying us is fair,” another MainOne employee said, noting that the salaries remained in naira but not sharing other specifics.
The integration took nearly two years because of workload migration-the process of moving applications, data, and IT processes from across environments, two persons said.
This can involve shifting resources between physical servers, virtual machines, or even across different infrastructures, such as from on-premise data centers to cloud platforms.
“Sometimes it takes that long to integrate systems. There are many factors to consider: the size of organisations, the difference between their product portfolio, pricing, operation support system, and business support system that they run,” one telecom industry executive who asked not to be named told TechCabal.
