Equinix interconnection services continue to make money for the data center giant. The company yesterday reported that interconnection revenues totaled 16 percent, or about $195 million of its $1.216 billion in total revenues for the first quarter of 2018. In addition, interconnection revenues grew 16 percent year-over year.

And today the company said it added private connectivity to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute cloud services to Miami and Paris.

On a call with investors, Equinix interim CEO Peter Van Camp said interconnection growth again outpaced colocation during the first quarter, although the latter service still made up the bulk — 73 percent — of the company’s revenues.

The interconnection revenue growth reinforced “the foundational importance of interconnection in today’s hybrid and multi-cloud architectures,” Van Camp said.

According to an interconnection market study recently published by Equinix, the capacity for private data exchange between enterprises and cloud providers is forecast to grow six-times faster than public internet traffic between 2017 and 2020.

Under the new deal with Microsoft Azure, customers in the Miami and Paris metro areas can directly access Azure cloud services via an edge node. Equinix already provides this service in 20 global markets. And customers in other areas can remotely access Azure ExpressRoute via the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, an on-demand platform that uses software-defined networking (SDN) to connect data center customers to any other customer at any Equinix local globally.

Equinix provides similar direct, private connections to more than 2,500 cloud service providers including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-services (SaaS) companies in its 200 data centers worldwide. These include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, AT&T, and Verizon.

The company also scooped up new data centers during the quarter, which Van Camp described as “strengthening our interconnection density.”

It paid $800 for the Infomart Dallas, which is an interconnection hub for the Southwest U.S., and $792 million for Metronode, an Australian data center company. “Our Metronode acquisition establishes Equinix as the market leader in Australia, expanding our footprint from five to 15 data centers to accelerate interconnection and digital edge deployments nationwide,” Van Camp said.

Overall it was a good quarter for the data center company, which posted its 61st quarter of consecutive revenue growth.

First quarter 2018 revenues surged 10 percent year-over-year to the previously mentioned $1.216 billion. Adjusted EBITDA was $580 million for the quarter, up 11 percent year-over-year.

Van Camp said Equinix’s recent acquisitions made it the market leader in 16 out of the 24 countries in which it operates and said 47 percent of Fortune 500 companies are Equinix customers.