The digital disruption caused by video, social media and other rich media content on our daily lives cannot be underestimated or ignored. Broadband penetration is expected to reach over 70% of households in Western Europe by 2015 according to IHS Screen Digest. The Content and Digital Media players who are responsible for delivering this content to end users play an increasingly pivotal role in the digital economy. Content and Media companies are responsible for a large proportion of innovation and growth within the digital economy and its industries – which span broadcast, retail, media, advertising, gaming and content delivery systems – and are trailblazers in many respects.
Introduction
A core foundation of their success is the need for integration and collaboration between complementing Content and Media organisations as well as other third parties such as service providers, operators, developers, enterprises, vertical organisations and more. Most would agree that this collaboration between partners is essential to delivering content, but how and where this collaboration takes
place is perhaps less well understood.
Driving Commercial Value in a Changing Landscape
For a growing number of Content and Media companies, the data centre is fast becoming a core strategic component of their collaboration strategy and has the ability to have a direct impact on revenue and customer loyalty. Collaboration within the data centre offers a compelling commercial value case in a number of key areas.
IDC reports that the industry expects the total number of data centres to fall from 2.94 million in 2012 to 2.89 million in 2016 (IDC: U.S. Datacenter 2012–2016 Forecast). But conversely, the size of data centre estates will get much bigger as we see ‘old’ on–premise data centres phased out and replaced with bigger, better and more connected third–party multi–tenant data centres. Increasingly, organisations will move their valuable data and applications away from on–premise facilities, to off–premise and third–party data centre providers.
This trend has also coincided with the shift across all major European markets from analogue to digital. Content and Media companies have felt this shift and moved from being ‘isolated islands’, to interconnected networks of partners operating in tandem with other companies that provide CDN services, marketing services, storage, compute power and other media services.
Improving Workflow Amid Data Explosion
As volumes of data increase, managing service delivery in an organisation’s own data centre is not scalable or viable in the long-term. In the mobile sector content and data delivered via mobile devices will grow by 66% per annum through 2017 to 11.2 Exabytes per month (GSMA: Mobile Global Economy Report). And in content and video streaming the adoption of bandwidth–hungry services such as online TV streaming like BBC iPlayer, Netflix and Lovefilm Instant place huge demands on data consumption capabilities.
Inefficiencies are therefore highlighted more acutely in the physical or internet based transmission of increasingly larger files between players in the value chain and the fact organisations are often restricted by the lack of network choice. The time for businesses to act is now to prevent this becoming a further issue in the future and a barrier to business growth and end user experience. Content and Media organisations can optimise cost through managing supply chain and workflows more efficiently in the data centre. It gives them the opportunity to collaborate in neutral, third party facilities where they have access to best–of–breed technology and scalability.
Proximity and Speed
Content and Media organisations are able to drive better user experience and meet customer demand by locating in close proximity to partners and potential partners. Previously, applications and interfaces may have been located in on–premise data centres located far from population densities.
The impact of applications and content residing so far from where users are trying to access them has in some cases created extraordinary inefficiencies such as high latency, which can lead to poor customer experience.
This ultimately impacts an application or content source’s ability to deliver or realise commercial value.
Future Value of Innovation
But what of the future revenue potential from new and existing customers derived from business model and service model evolution? The ability to collaborate in an open, vendor neutral environment and select partners based on compatibility, service offerings and alignment to their own business needs is appealing and has a clear, commercial value.
Interconnection within the data centre is the most efficient, secure, economically viable way to partner with complementing organisations. Organisations that partner in this way have stronger relationships and can accelerate innovation, service delivery and ultimately revenue and profitability. In this environment CDM companies can accelerate the performance of their business through direct connection with ecosystem partners, accessing value–add ecosystems e.g. Mobile. They can also explore new service delivery models through cloud, and access all the bandwidth they require through broadest choice of networks around the world.
To accelerate this collaboration, the Equinix Marketplace, an easy to use website for Equinix customers gives organisations the ability to easily find, buy and sell services from across a wide footprint of 95+ sites, across 31 markets and 5 continents. Customers can showcase and market their services, manage their own storefront, search and discover products and services offered in Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX®) data centres. They have access to 900+ networks and 4000+ enterprise, cloud, digital content and financial companies.
The Power of New Opportunities
The access to vertical ecosystems is perhaps one of the most compelling components at play here. For example, by locating in an Equinix IBX data centre, organisations can gain access to business ecosystems for the cloud, content, financial, mobile, and networking industries, allowing companies to significantly lower costs, improve application performance and simplify data centre deployments.Vertical collaboration also allows organisations to keep pace with trends and issues across other vertical markets outside of their particular sector.
Equinix is seeing approximately 20% interconnection growth between different verticals, and between industries such as Cloud and financial services, it is as high as 50%. $5.5bn of business is transacted inside the Platform Equinix™ Ecosystem each year. In these instances, organisations are experiencing the very real tangible effects of collaborating in the data centre.
Service providers, operators, developers and enterprise organisations need to wake–up to this opportunity and implement new strategies which combine the ability to simultaneously reduce costs and increase performance. The data centre is a great place to start.
For more information on the commercial value of collaboration, please click here to contact Equinix
