By: Andrew Fray
With whole industries facing digital disruption, tightening regulation and mounting pressure on margins, no business can afford to ignore opportunities to enhance competitiveness. In fact, digital innovators now report twice the revenue growth of less agile competitors, while almost nine-in-ten companies view IT transformation as a critical competitive opportunity.
In this environment, capitalising on the power of connectivity is a crucial way to accelerate business success. Better connected companies can collaborate much more easily – developing fresh ideas and rapidly adding new capabilities to drive differentiation. Today, there’s no better place for this kind of collaboration than inside carrier-neutral colocation facilities.
Unlike on-premise data centres, or even wholesale and carrier-owned facilities, carrier-neutral colocation unites a huge range of businesses and connectivity providers under one roof. The independent nature of carrier-neutral colocation means these facilities can offer access to ready-formed communities of interest.
With a host of different businesses all rubbing shoulders inside a single facility - and the ideal technical foundation for collaboration already in place – carrier-neutral colocation lets organisations develop ideas, solve problems and seek competitive advantage in new ways. The biggest and best facilities will have a whole value chain of key players from every industry on-site.
With a broad mix of potential suppliers, partners and customers only a cross-connect away, businesses can make informed investments in private interconnections that maximise performance, reach and cost-efficiency. The opportunities are endless - from rapidly adopting a useful third-party service, to linking to an Internet Exchange Point for fast, low-cost access to global connectivity.
By harnessing low-latency, high performance interconnectivity, organisations can rapidly exchange data, capabilities, or services with an industry-specific set of potential suppliers, partners and customers at an unmatchable low cost. All this means colocation customers have more options and greater access to new capabilities that can help differentiate them in a crowded marketplace. As such, those businesses exploiting the potential of colocation to underpin new partnerships will have an edge over competitors when it comes to both growth and innovation.
At Interxion we’re seeing this in action. From financial services to digital media and connectivity, our well-established customer communities are joining forces to solve shared challenges. For instance, our close-knit financial community of more than 200 capital market participants is developing and sharing new services to conquer upcoming regulatory challenges like MiFID II and the GDPR. From aggregating market data, to complying with atomic time-stamping requirements, these firms can easily buy and sell new capabilities as part of a closely connected community of exchanges, ISVs and service providers.
As a whole, Interxion’s London Data Centre Campus now enables customers to promote and sell services to a pre-made community of hundreds of organisations. A £30m expansion is also underway that will add 1,800m2 more data centre space – expanding our community even further.
To learn more, see how the communities of interest in Interxion’s growing London Data Centre Campus interconnect and exchange data to fuel innovation, drive differentiation and unlock new revenue streams.