Despite a tough European economy, the content and digital media industry is growing at a phenomenal pace. In the UK alone the media and creative industries are worth more than £36 billion a year and generate £70,000 every minute for the UK economy (UK Government Report - Making it easier for the media and creative industries to grow, 2013). And more widely across Europe the content and media industry has reached an aggregate £150bn in value across key markets including UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland (IHS Screen Digest Report, 2011).

With this phenomenal growth comes increasingly more complex and difficult to manage supply chains and the content and digital media industry has had to look at new ways to innovate through collaboration.

A key facility to achieving greater collaboration is connecting to partners and suppliers based on suitability of solutions and not just physical location but your ability to reach a global audience.

In an increasingly interconnected world, organisations are finding they are better placed to achieve strategic objectives by connecting within an ecosystem of partners that crosses industries and national borders.

“In the past, companies would literally fly tapes from one production house to another, but that’s simply not practical when you’re dealing with petabytes of data in a global industry. For collaboration in today’s media industry to work, the effective use of public cloud infrastructure is absolutely essential.“ – Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma CEO.

The benefits from global collaboration and close proximity to the end user can be seen is in the advertising sector with Real-Time Bidding (RTB). IDC forecasts advertising sales in Western Europe growing from $227 million in 2011 to $2.5 billion by 2016 (IDC Real-Time Bidding in the US and the World 2011-2016, 2011 Report).

Here brands can bid for the right to place an advert on a web page, which is targeted at a specific customer irrespective of geography or location. This relies on many ecosystem partners coming together in real time and providing personalised advertising to the end user in fractions of a second. When this collaboration takes place in the data centre, the geographic location of the ecosystem partners and end users becomes irrelevant to the performance and user experience.

Content and digital media companies must also consider the transparency of their partner relationships. Collaboration needs to be fostered in neutral environments where there is freedom of choice and no vendor lock-in. This means content and digital media companies are best placed to react to the changing marketplace, scaling-up and down as their needs require and with the freedom to switch vendors or partners further down the line as their needs dictate.

Innovation is bred through interconnectivity; access to a wide choice of global partners enables healthy competition and drives higher standards and best practice. Content and digital media companies that partner in neutral, carrier-dense data centres benefit from the ‘certainty of choice’ and have the reassurance that they aren’t locked into a relationship with one or two partners simply because of limited choices through location.

Alongside transparency, security is another key consideration for content and digital media companies when assessing how they collaborate with partners in their ecosystem. Whilst speed and simplicity are vital, a secure and robust environment for data transfer is a business imperative.

"Increasingly core go-to-market processes, customer experiences and business value are being determined by how seamlessly a company can integrate and collaborate with its customers and a diverse set of business partners." (Collaborate to Innovate Study by the CMO Council and BPM Forum).

Collaborating inside Platform Equinix allows organisations to design the ultimate future-proofed IT infrastructure. What’s more it allows you to scale globally.

Equinix global data centres offer state-of-the-art, neutral, network-dense colocation space and interconnections. They are home to an increasing number of content and digital media organisations, as well as powerful ecosystems for cloud, mobility, enterprise and financial services.

By placing your infrastructure and data in Platform Equinix you are surrounded by opportunities to form new interconnections with business partners, service providers and networks. Equinix data centres also benefit from best-in-class security equipment, techniques and procedures and is accredited by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

Locating your organisation in close proximity to cloud platforms and your customers, within Equinix data centres in 31 major business markets across 15 countries and 5 continents also reduces latency and improves time-to-market.