OREANDA-NEWS. November 20, 2015. The headline statistic from our recent Enterprise of the Future  survey is that the number of enterprises worldwide that are deploying interconnection will more than double by 2017 to 84%. And no geographic region is set to mirror this accelerated global growth more than Asia-Pacific (AP), where the percentage of interconnected enterprises looks to increase from 34% to 85% over the next two years.

The survey defined interconnection as, “The ability to connect employees, partners and customers to what they need, in the right context, using the devices, channels and services they prefer. Interconnection integrates partners, customers and employees across geographies through direct physical and virtual connections, to accelerate business performance and create new opportunities.”

We asked businesses from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore if they were familiar with “interconnection,” as defined above, and 76% of AP respondents said they were extremely/very familiar with it. A whopping 98% reporting that interconnection was important to their company’s ability to compete.

China stands out as the most interconnected country in the region, with 52% of the enterprises deploying interconnection today. Australia and Hong Kong respondents reported one-fourth of their enterprises are interconnected. However, like the region as a whole, the percentage in two those places is expected to quickly rise by 2017, with the survey indicating it will reach 75%.

Asia-Pacific Enterprises See Significant Dollar Value from Interconnection

Interconnection is a significant driver for revenue growth, which was the top IT and business priority for the global enterprises surveyed. For AP companies, deploying infrastructures in new geographies was seen as the most important way to improve revenues, followed by creating new channels and deploying infrastructure to support new projects. Both of these strategies are significantly interconnection-reliant.

The value from interconnection to organizations is real and quantifiable in both revenue opportunities and cost savings. Nearly a third of the AP interconnected enterprises reported seeing more than \\$10 million in value realized from interconnection, with 58% seeing benefits in revenue opportunities and 42% in cost savings.

The challenges/opportunities that led the interconnected companies to explore interconnection covered a wide range, including:

  • Needing to improve security and minimize risk and exposure (75%),
  • Connecting physical locations at greater speed (74%)
  • Gaining scale and agility (67%)
  • Delivering a better user experience (66%)
  • Reducing unit workload costs (61%)
  • Increasing application performance (54%).

It’s clear that interconnection is seen as a solution to many different business issues, including those that are expected to cause the most disruption. When asked which industry trends would prompt them to re-architect their networks over the next 12 months, cyber-security came out on top (61%), followed by sustainability (49%), big data (46%) and hybrid cloud/cloud (44%).

Hybrid and multi-cloud interconnection is a prevalent strategy in AP businesses, with 69% of respondents having already deployed multi-cloud interconnections across multiple locations or currently working with a partner to do so. Eighty-seven percent of AP respondents said their companies would either be fully multi-cloud interconnected or implementing a multi-cloud interconnection solution within five years. Multi-cloud goals also run the gamut from:

  • Business continuity/disaster recovery (55%)
  • Collaboration with customers, employees and vendors (54%)
  • Agility (50%)
  • Technology testing (47%)
  • Workload migration and optimization (46%)

Learn more about the global results of our survey by downloading the Enterprise of the Future report.