Jeroen Schlosser, Managing Director, Equinix MENA discusses how in this interconnected era there are ample new opportunities available for those channel partners who are ready to embrace ICT transformation.
As our digital world continues to evolve, we are entering a new phase: the interconnected era. This period of intense online collaboration and real-time participation is characterized by faster, richer forms of connectivity. The interconnected era also features new mobile, cloud and social technologies, which are driving transformational change across all sectors – including information and communications technology (ICT).
Indeed, ICT will not only be transformed by the interconnected era, but will be a key enabler of transformation across every sector. For channel partners at the forefront of the interconnected era, significant new business opportunities beckon. For those who are slow to react, the threats to survival are real and rising.
The failure of traditional IT infrastructures
The need for greater interconnectivity is being driven by three key factors:
- Business expansion
- Ubiquitous user access
- The sourcing of both external business and IT services
Enterprises need more points of engagement with more users, partners and providers across an ever-widening physical and logical footprint. These interconnected business models and services require secure, real-time data exchange across many participants.
But traditional enterprise IT infrastructures cannot deliver the scalability, speed, performance, security or flexibility required. The majority of data and workloads in those infrastructures reside on highly centralized IT systems designed primarily to run on-premise, back-office “systems of record” – such as core databases and files. They were not built to handle the cloud and mobile-based applications that constitute today’s “systems of engagement,” which support functions such as transaction processing, communications, collaboration and analytics.
The need for an Interconnection Oriented Architecture
The traditional model of IT is being transformed to become more user-centric. Increasingly, an enterprise’s “systems of engagement” will be based on distributed architectures.
An Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA) shifts the fundamental delivery architecture of IT from siloed and centralized to distributed, internetworked and colocated. IOA enables enterprises to directly and securely connect employees, partners and customers to what they need, in the right context, using the devices, channels and services they prefer.
The channel must embrace today’s cloud-based world
Businesses are now moving an increasing proportion of their IT spend away from CAPEX-based investment in on-premise IT and centralized data centers and into cloud-based services and hybrid infrastructures. As budgets tighten, margins are squeezed. Value-added resellers (VARs), solution providers and systems integrators who continue to focus solely on supplying the networks, hardware and software that support a highly-centralized, on-premise model of IT will struggle to remain profitable. You need to demonstrate how you can help customers take advantage of cloud-based services in order to succeed in the interconnected era.
Customers are looking for an approach based on evolution rather than revolution. They need providers who can help them realize the benefits of interconnection while maximizing the return on their existing infrastructure investments.
We have identified four key interconnection opportunities for channel businesses:
- Empowering the digital user
- Addressing the challenges of connecting multiple global locations
- Enabling a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy
- Helping companies manage the deluge of digital data
Partnering is the route to profit
To expand your offering in the interconnected era without extending your overheads, you need to work with partners who can connect you to broad ecosystems of vendors, service providers and cloud companies. You also need to work with the right partners to address your resourcing strategies, skills development, investment decisions, operational model and go-to-market approach.
