A core foundation of the mobile industry is the need for integration and collaboration between all members of its ecosystems; service providers, operators, developers, enterprises, vertical organisations and more. Most would agree that this collaboration between partners is essential to delivering content and services via mobile devices, but how and where this collaboration takes place is perhaps less well understood.
Introduction
For a growing number within the mobile value system, the data centre is fast becoming a core strategic component of their collaboration strategy. Collaboration within the data centre offers a compelling commercial value case, firstly, around optimising costs through proximity and speed which drive better user experience.
Secondly, though opportunities for growth around the ‘value at stake’, i.e. the potential opportunities which come when you partner with complementary organisations and collaborate effectively to drive new or existing revenue.
Cost Optimisation
But not everywhere across mobile ecosystems are the benefits of data centre outsourcing or colocation being realised. For example, service providers often house their own applications, such as voicemail, messaging and storage, with application programming interfaces for third-party platform providers. These in-house applications reside in multiple data centres located far from population densities.
The impact of applications and content residing so far from where mobile users are trying to access them has created extraordinary inefficiencies. It invariably results in 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. Furthermore, there are core issues concerning security and limited power redundancy. The economies of scale achieved within a large neutral data centre provider often allows for higher levels of technical redundancy and security.
Data Explosion
Maintaining services in-house in legacy data centres is not scalable or viable in the long-term. Data consumption levels are constantly rising. According to the GSMA, data will grow by 66% per annum through 2017 to 11.2 exabytes per month. This equates to more than 5 billion hours of HD video (GSMA: Mobile Global Economy Report). The data problems being faced by organisations delivering content to mobile today don't even come close to the issues they will have in the coming years.
Mobile video is one area which accounts for a huge proportion of this data explosion, 75% of mobile data in Western Europe will be video in the next four years. The delivery of video to mobile is enabled by a complex web of organisations working together, including content provider, CDN operator, mobile operator handset vendor and application developers. When these groups work in isolation the challenge to react to constant and important changes in each other's business or delivery model becomes far higher. This is why EE, for example, is calling for a working group to promote understanding and cooperation which will address these mobile video challenges [Source: Total Telecom].
Data will grow by 66% per annum through 2017 to 11.2 Exabytes per month.
This equates to more than 5 billion hours of HD video
(GSMA: Mobile Global Economy Report).The time to act is now - to prevent this becoming a further issue in the future and a barrier to business growth and end user experience. They should instead be considering collaborating in neutral, third party data centres where they have access to best-of-breed technology and scalability.
Future Growth
But what of the future revenue potential form new and existing customer derived from collaboration within the data centre and the commercial value this brings to mobile ecosystems? As outlined above these ecosystems are vastly complex and intertwined.
The ability to collaborate in an open, vendor neutral environment and select partners based on compatibility, service offerings and alignment to your own business needs is surely appealing and has a clear, commercial value.
Equinix Marketplace 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 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.
Conclusion
All players in the mobile value chain need direct access to their partners and enablers, allowing them to create solutions that localise traffic, scale bandwidth and monetise services.
Unfortunately, at the moment too often companies are fire-fighting the immediate needs of their business. 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.