About 84 per cent of IT leaders will deploy IT infrastructure where interconnection - defined as direct, secure physical or virtual connections between a company and its partners, customers and employees - is at the core by 2017, compared to only 38 per cent today, according to a survey.

 

The Enterprise of the Future survey by Equinix, a leading interconnection and data centre company, unveiled the findings which uncovered a rapidly accelerating global demand for interconnection that will transform IT strategies over the next two years. 

 

Studying the priorities and perspectives of more than 1,000 IT decision makers across 14 countries, the survey revealed significant momentum towards the adoption of interconnection-dependent IT strategies by enterprises seeking to drive revenue growth. 

 

The survey also indicateed that interconnection can create millions of dollars in value. 

 

In the interconnected era business models are increasingly interdependent and consumers and employees alike consider anytime, anywhere, any device connectivity the standard, it said.

 

Organisational expansion, ubiquitous user access and the sourcing of external business and IT services to cloud-based providers are forcing enterprises to have more points of engagement with more end users and business partners across an ever-widening physical and logical footprint. 

 

The existing IT architectures were not built to support this level of dynamic engagement and distributed coverage, and the survey showed enterprises responding with a massive strategic and behavioral shift away from centralised corporate resources to distributed, interconnection-centric IT infrastructure.

 

The number one business priority for nearly half of the survey respondents is to drive revenue, and interconnection was at the core of all the strategies cited as key to achieving this goal, said the survey.

 

In fact, three-in-five businesses believed interconnection with employees, partners and customers is 'very important' to their company’s ability to compete. 

 

Nearly half of the companies surveyed are currently pursuing direct connections to cloud platforms, with the vast majority (about four-in-five) seeing this as a critical need to address within five years. And, most notably, of the enterprises already deploying interconnection strategies, more than one-third are reaping a total value of more than $10 million from revenue gains and cost savings.  

 

Tony Bishop, vice president vertical marketing, Equinix, said: “Traditional enterprise IT infrastructures are not equipped to compete in this new interconnected era without fundamental change. 

 

"With Equinix’s Interconnection Oriented Architecture, we enable enterprises to take a transformative approach to interconnecting people, locations, clouds and data, which is essential to market differentiation and growth.” - TradeArabia News Service