OREANDA-NEWS. October 05, 2015. No one denies that walls still have a purpose at most companies. They help keep out the weather, provide handy spots to hang calendars, and create space for people to work and host the occasional holiday party. But the digital economy’s interconnected era is giving rise to a new kind of company that requires the type of interconnection that tears down most organizational and business walls to open up pathways for greater collaboration and innovation.

This new company lives in the cloud and finds business advantages in interconnection that’s fast, collaborative and global. It creates value by instantly connecting geographically distributed partners to complete complex tasks, and by bringing its business applications closer to dispersed end users anywhere, anytime, on any device they choose.

In the interconnected era, this new, wall-free company – called a digital company – is what every company must become.

Doing Digital Business                                                                               

According to Gartner, a key characteristic of digital companies is that they are “digitalizing their physical assets, as well as their virtual assets.” That work is happening in the cloud.

Gartner also discussed the “digital business” of digital companies, which it defines as “the emerging trend of organizations creating new business designs by blurring the physical and digital worlds.” In its report, “Determine Your Digital Business Architecture Building Blocks to Guide Investment Decisions,” Gartner calls out several characteristics of digital business, including:

  • “Digital business is specifically focused on the peer exchange and communication between businesses, people and physical things as equal entities.”
  • “Digital business will increasingly include the connection or integration with assets beyond the control of any one company.”

The “We Economy”

In a separate report, Technology Vision 2015, Accenture also discusses the collaboration and integration with different partners, services and assets that’s required in digital business. The report says pioneering enterprises are changing their focus from “me” to “we” in what it calls the “we economy.” This economy features an array of growing digital ecosystems, whose capabilities the digital company combines to meet its business priorities. In fact, Accenture said, “A single idea, a single technology or a single organization will no longer be the key to success.”

“High performers of the future will be those who position themselves at the center of the emerging digital ecosystems,” the Accenture report said.

An Interconnected Enterprise

There’s no better company to position the enterprise “at the center of emerging digital ecosystems” than Equinix.

We’re home to an array of emerging (and established) ecosystems – our financial service ecosystems in New York and London are well-known examples. We specialize in cultivating ecosystems, and the enterprise can get near or inside them via our Performance Hub offering, which allows customers to deploy IT at any one of our 105 data centers worldwide.

We also seek to enable digital companies to reach a new level of interconnection by helping them become interconnected enterprises.

Digital companies need to connect to partners, data sources, service providers and customers around the world simultaneously and instantly.

  • An interconnected enterprise does that with the highest-performing, lowest-latency connections because Equinix’s global reach can get it closer to its partners and users anywhere, right out to the edge of the network.
  • An interconnected enterprise does that with the safest connections anywhere because Equinix enables it to bypass the public Internet and make private, direct connections to service providers and vendors.
  • An interconnected enterprise operates as cost-efficiently as possible because Equinix is home to 6,250 customers, including more than 1,100 networks and 1,300 cloud and IT providers, giving the enterprise access to the most efficient routes and the widest choice of service providers in the most markets.

Click the link to learn more about how your digital company can become an interconnected enterprise.