OREANDA-NEWS. October 26, 2015. A recent Enterprise of the Future survey by Equinix of 1,000 IT decision-makers in 14 countries revealed that enterprises worldwide are embracing a new level of interconnection to drive market differentiation and growth. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Americas.

Nearly half of the businesses in the U.S., Canada and Brazil have or are currently deploying interconnection, with that number projected to double to 92% by 2017. By comparison, worldwide interconnection deployment is at 38% today, growing to 84% within the next 24 months. (See the blog post: “Interconnected Enterprises Set to More than Double by 2017”).

Modern-day interconnection bypasses the public Internet and is defined as the direct and secure, physical or virtual connections between an enterprise and its partners, customers and employees. Nearly 100% of the Americas’ companies surveyed said that interconnection was “important to their company’s ability to compete,” but there are some interesting distinctions as we look at the growth of interconnected enterprises across the Americas.

By 2017, the number of interconnected enterprises in the U.S. will reach 95%, and our survey indicates Brazil and Canada won’t be far behind ̶ Brazil’s respondents expect to have 92% of their enterprises interconnected by 2017 and Canada’s respondents expect 88% to be interconnected as well.

The survey indicated revenue growth is overwhelmingly the enterprise’s top priority, including in the Americas. And the top strategies used to jumpstart that growth in the Americas are, not surprisingly, interconnection-reliant. They include, in priority order:

  • Creating new channels (63%)
  • Deploying infrastructures to support new products (63%)
  • Deploying infrastructures in new geographies (62%)
  • Embedding or distributing intelligence, such as analytics, data or content, across business processes, regions or locations (52%)

The survey showed the benefits of interconnection are real and quantifiable, and in the Americas, enterprises reported some of the biggest benefits in the global survey. More than half the respondents who have already deployed interconnection solutions are realizing greater than \\$10 million in value created, with 55% of this value coming from increased revenue opportunity and 45% coming from cost savings.

The other tangible benefits of greater interconnection reported by enterprises in the Americas included:

  • Delivering a more positive user experience (80%)
  • Reducing workloads’ unit cost (68%)
  • Connecting more physical locations with greater speed (66%)
  • Increasing application performance (65%)

According to our survey, some of the challenges enterprises within the Americas are trying to overcome with greater interconnection include “cost to scale,” “systems uptime” and “cloud/mobile product maturity/availability.” The survey also indicated data security is an industry/ technology trend that is poised to prompt organizations to consider re-architecting their IT structures over the next 12 months. Cyber-security was the biggest disruptive trend cited by 68% of the respondents, and data sovereignty was reported by more than half of the Americas’ companies as the second most important trend to address.

Hybrid cloud/cloud was also reported by 58% of the companies as a major disruptive trend, and more than 92% of companies in the Americas plan to deploy multi-cloud strategies over multiple locations within the next five years. Companies in the Americas said the key strategic goal of interconnecting to the cloud was “collaboration, creating shared environments accessible by customers, employees and vendors with customizable access and security.”

Direct and secure interconnection helps meet that goal and other strategic priorities by circumventing the public Internet when accessing sensitive data. In addition, proximity to data, applications, analytics and cloud services allows interconnected enterprises to maintain country-specific compliance regulations.