OREANDA-NEWS. January 25, 2016. In today’s service-on-demand economy, superior interconnection between customers and their cloud services providers (CSPs), network service providers (NSPs) and other partners is required to satisfy end-user performance demands. Companies must look at their current business ecosystem and identify where the low-hanging fruit is to improve that ecosystem. Meanwhile, they’re also looking to drive down wide area network (WAN) solutions costs, while giving their users the same look, feel and responsiveness they get connecting from home, Starbucks or other non-corporate sites via their smart devices. None of this is easy.

Forrester calls the type of ubiquitous interconnection that people now expect “anywhere, anytime, any-device engagement,” and with 91% of U.S. consumers having at least one connected device, according to Forrester surveys, that expectation isn’t decreasing. At the same time, Forrester says, business users are increasing demands on internal IT that are challenging it to deliver mobile-enabled functions for anytime, anywhere, any-device access to information.

There is a lot of concern these days about the enormity of Internet of things (IoT) connectivity, security, and data collection and analysis. To achieve a comprehensive IoT strategy, companies are faced with a mind-numbing build-out of their data centers globally, including buying the property, establishing power contracts, reconfiguring their WANs, and finding which carriers are regionally available. Enterprise IT is already seen as slow to respond. This complex and costly approach does not help matters.

How does Equinix help?

The Equinix Performance Hub, Data Hub and Cloud Exchange solutions empower customers to meet these requirements quickly and on a global scale. For example, a major home goods supplier came to us to help make both cloud connectivity and enhancements to its WAN architecture. Its current MPLS WAN was not meeting customer, end-user and business requirements. Furthermore, its Internet connection to various CSPs was not providing the reliable and high-speed connectivity it needed. The company’s cloud requirements were moving from DevOps to business-critical applications.

We enabled them to transition from a “hub and spoke” MPLS WAN to a high-speed backbone via the Performance Hub (see figure below) and ensured not only costs that were two times lower but produced a six-fold improvement in latency and a three-fold reduction in bandwidthMore importantly, the Performance Hub provides a better user experience than they previously had via their corporate offices and the same or better compared to their local Starbucks.

In another case, a large software company asked us to help them globally deploy its software and updates to its customers. Further, it was looking to have its development teams located in specific global sites. Equinix’s Performance Hub, global reach, and interconnection solutions to partners, CSPs, and customers, made it the perfect platform for building out the company’s global deployment, thus ensuring its software was distributed globally, including revisions, in a fraction of the time it normally took.

In one final example, a multinational retail corporation brought us in to help them with multiple challenges. It needed to gather and analyze a massive amount of data to make key decisions in a timely manner, ensuring quick reaction to customers’ changing expectations. The company’s DevOps teams had to test their solutions without taxing their in-house resources and the company needed to bring its WAN up-to-date to support these requirements globally. The Equinix Performance Hub, Data Hub and Cloud Exchange delivered a global solution that met all the company’s requirements. The Data Hub and Cloud Exchange Solutions enabled close proximity interconnection so its storage and compute resources can, with low latency and high speed connectivity, interface to cloud-based big data solutions.

All this is possible because of Equinix and the value of interconnection. An Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA™) enables organizations to bring together customer, partner, and cloud and network provider ecosystems on a platform that interconnects people, locations, clouds and data. Learn more about the IOA and the Equinix Interconnection Platform and how they can provide game-changing results for your business.