The digital economy continues to transform how enterprises connect, communicate and collaborate with customers, partners and employees.
Over the past decade, “anytime, anywhere” connectivity -- made possible by new mobile, cloud and social technologies -- has become the norm.
Enterprises are dealing with more users, more locations, more devices, more data in more places.
To compete, they must explore new business models and new IT service delivery models.
Knowing this is a time of tremendous change and opportunity for you, I wanted to take a moment to tell you how Equinix is laying the groundwork to help you get ready for the next wave of IT transformation.
Devices: There will be 20.6 billion networked devices in 2018, or almost 3 per capita (2)
Applications: Mobile apps are revolutionizing how we live our lives and are a $27B market in 2014, growing at an 85% rate(3)
Mobility: 50% of all networked devices will be mobile-connected by 2018. An average smartphone will generate 5.4GB of data traffic/month(4)
Social: 90% of online adults 19-29 use social media according to Pew Research. Information flow is now real-time across global social networks
Cloud: Public cloud services market is forecast to grow at 18.5% and reach $131B worldwide in 2017.(5)
Trading: Trading is now more electronic and high-frequency, reflected in rapidly rising peak market data message volumes. More than 70% of foreign exchange volumes is electronically traded. [6]
Big Data: 90% of the world’s data has been generated in 2012 and 2013(6), >800% growth is expected by 2020, with 80% of new data unstructured
Source: [1][2][4] Cisco, [3] ABI Research, [5] Gartner, [6] Greenwich Associates, [7] IBM
In this environment, businesses need to make and manage many points of engagement with users, partners and providers across a widening footprint both physically and logically.
Existing enterprise IT architecture was not built to support dynamic engagement and distributed coverage.
And as the world's interconnection leader, we take this growing requirement very seriously.
A new era is dawning in our digital economy: the interconnected era. In this era, the demands placed on connectivity have reached a new high.
With hundreds of complex tasks divided among dozens of enterprises and global cloud services, extreme responsiveness, speed and participation enabled by secure, real-time data exchange is a non-negotiable.
Companies need interconnection, a form of connectivity that’s instant, direct, massively scalable and increasingly more flexible, secure and reliable than its predecessors.
That’s why companies are coming together inside Equinix to realize new opportunities.
They are transacting faster, conducting business more efficiently and innovating to tap into the digital economy’s next wave of value creation.
So how do we do it?
Interconnection helps you reach the world.
Globalization means that business in increasingly international.
The Internet has drastically lowered the barriers to international expansion, allowing companies to expand into new markets overnight.
Supply chains are global, creating the need to share mission-critical data around the world.
While business is international, regulation is still local, meaning your data may not be as free to travel as you are.
So while the Internet is global, location still matters. You need to have infrastructure near your customers and employees to meet your performance, security and compliance needs. And you need to know that the available interconnection is rich, reliable and flexible enough to quickly reach the partners you need to reach, exactly when you need to reach them.
Challenge: Businesses are demanding private and secure connections to the cloud as on-site applications, such as virtual desktops, move to the cloud alongside big data and Internet of Things business processes. And they want those cloud connections to offer more consistent performance than the public Internet and to maximize their existing infrastructure. Microsoft planned to deliver those connections via Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute. But Microsoft needed a global data center partner that offered both high network density and the ability to reach markets worldwide.
Solution: Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute partnered with Equinix in 16 markets to offer private, high-performance connections onto the Microsoft Azure cloud. Equinix’s data center footprint, which includes 100-plus facilities spread over five continents, gives the companies that take advantage of the ExpressRoute-Equinix partnership unparalleled scale and choice as they build hybrid environments with enterprise-grade reliability.
Each line represents an interconnection between a customer and its counterparty in the same or a different industry.
Your digital supply chain is as important as your physical supply chain
As much as 20% (Gartner Hyperdigitization) of the world’s products and services are now digital and are distributed via digital supply chains.
This places enormous throughput and reliability burdens on your corporate networks – creating risky bottlenecks at the network edge.
This also allows innovation, where information is aggregated, analyzed and distributed between partners in new ways to create new value.
This means the ways you are interconnected within and between industry ecosystems is vital.
You need to be interconnected to multiple partners, in multiple geographies with facilities that allow for high throughput and performance and minimal cost.
The best model is to be literally “plugged-in” to your digital supply chain in hubs where your industry can interconnect quickly and securely with partners inside any ecosystem.
Challenge: Latency in the online ad market means lost revenue.
Solution: Locating its video ad exchange inside Equinix allowed Brightroll to bypass the unpredictable public Internet.
The Equinix Difference: The increase in the successful bid rate resulted in a corresponding increase in potential revenue for all transacting parties.
Connection is key to realizing the promised business benefits of cloud. But one-to-one connection is not enough…
If you use cloud services, the interconnected cloud helps you cloud-enable your company by delivering the security, performance and choice you need to confidently rely on the cloud for mission-critical business.
If you provide cloud services, the interconnected cloud gives you the fastest route to cloud revenue by empowering you to connect to thousands of partners and customers in an instant while creating higher-performance, more differentiated service offerings for your customers.
Cloud success requires interconnection, the ability to privately and securely connect multiple clouds across multiple sites using multiple forms of access.
Challenge: Foursquare, a local search and discovery application, felt limited by the technical and performance constraints of the AWS-only infrastructure.
Solution: The direct connection to AWS helped Foursquare sustain its growth.
The Equinix Difference:
Costs stayed flat, even as transaction processing capabilities doubled.
The 5-fold increase in speed was a result of the direct connections.
The benefits of a private cloud include customized computing capabilities. The benefits of AWS include scalability and its on-tap features.
The Equinix Difference:
Accelera also reduced customer hardware capital outlay by more than $300,000.
More specifically, Azure’s competitive edge is found in its speed, security, cost, performance and reliability.
Accerela customers are able to deploy and scale new solutions more rapidly because of the specific performance and scalability gains.
Customers expect more than traditional WAN architectures can deliver.
End users expect access to applications and data anywhere in the world, at any time of day, on all sorts of devices with low latency and no downtime.
Typical solutions to increase network capacity add expense and don’t improve latency or help with cloud service access.
The digital enterprise must have points of engagement with users, partners and providers across a widening footprint, both physically and logically, and a distributed network architecture strategy can make all the difference.
Equinix Performance Hub changes the game - enhance end-user satisfaction while lowering costs.
Equinix Performance Hub is an enterprise network extension node in an Equinix IBX that offers secure and highly reliable connectivity to network and cloud providers.
Performance – dramatically accelerates delivery of data and applications
Reliability – achieves higher reliability for IT services
Access – provides private, direct access to leading cloud and managed service providers with higher reliability and speed
Cost Reduction – Simplifies, reduces costs and allows you to take control of your WA
