SiliconAngle Head Writer Winston Edmondson caught up with Switch Communications’ Jason Mendenhall at EMC World 2013 to get his take on co-location, connectivity, and the value of a strong cloud ecosystem.

Switch fancies itself the world’s best coloc provider. The company operates a 2.2 million square foot data center in Las Vegas that its founding CEO bought from Enron, which equipped it with unique bandwidth sharing capabilities before it went under. Mendenhall tells Winston that the facility’s networking infrastructure enables Switch to support 30 carriers and combine customers’ buying power to reduce bandwidth costs by 40 to 60 percent.

Switch’s edge over the competition is its ecosystem. Mendenhall says that 42 different cloud providers set up shop in his company’s facility, a variety that gives customers the freedom to choose from a uniquely high number of technology and pricing options. The fact that these providers host their platforms in close proximity to user deployments has another major advantage: it eliminates the need to transmit data over large distances. This is a huge selling point for the type of customers that Switch is catering too.

Mendenhall brings up the Greenplum Apache Workbench, a 24-petabyte Hadoop testing environment that his firm developed in collaboration with VMware. He also mentions that one enterprise customer chose Switch to host its 96-petabyte data warehouse and 20-petabyte Hadoop cluster.

Safety is another major consideration for the type of organizations that Switch is catering to. The executive says that Las Vegas is the only metropolitan in America that has a zero rating for natural disaster, and notes his company employs a military-trained security team deal to deal with unnatural disasters.

Mendenhall concludes the interview by highlighting that cloud and Big Data have yet to gain traction in the traditional enterprise. He expects this will change in the next three to four years.

For full details of Mendenhall’s conversation with Edmondson, click on the video below.