Regardless of what industry you work in, it’s safe to say that today’s working environment has changed dramatically. Mobile technology has altered how staff communicate and how businesses interact and compete. It’s commonplace for employees, and partners, to work across offices and borders. And the Internet has reduced the barriers to industries everywhere, leading to a rise of entrepreneurial online start-ups, eager to eat into the market share of established players.
In this fast-paced landscape, collaboration with employees, partners and suppliers is essential to the success of any business. Through collaboration, companies can not only innovate more quickly, but also drive a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace. For example, Apple recently announced a partnership with IBM which will enable the company to provide iPhones and iPads tailored specifically to the business environment.
In reality, no product, project or infrastructure build can be developed or maintained in isolation. Landmarks such as the London Eye or the Shard were not constructed solely by the architect who designed them. They would have required input and collaboration from local government, residents, transport groups, investors and local businesses. A data center is no exception. A successful data center build requires collaboration from multiple stakeholders, and it’s the role of both the data center provider and the partner to challenge one another to maximize innovation and efficiency. That’s exactly what we’ve done with our new data center build in London: LD6.
Through collaboration with our partner Lang O’Rourke, we’re using digital engineering techniques to eliminate elements of risk involved in the data center build. Stakeholders are able to view the proposed building in a 3D environment, make changes, and understand their effects before they are implemented. This, in turn, helps us to improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase performance.
But collaboration shouldn’t just take place in the implementation stage of a data center build, it should be something that is practiced on an ongoing basis within the data center itself. At Equinix, we work closely with a range of manufacturers, suppliers and partners, to do things better and more efficiently for our customers.
We also enable collaboration among our customers like no other data center provider because of the access we offer to a variety of ecosystems. More than 1,000 networks, 1,200 cloud and technology services, 800 financial services firms and 475 digital content and media companies connect to our global interconnection platform. That means our data centers can be an interconnection point for the integration of services, technologies and customer opportunities.
LD6 will offer a new path, with unique strengths, into these different ecosystems, as will the four other Equinix facilities across the Americas and Asia opening in the early months of 2015 (in Melbourne, Singapore, Toronto and New York).
As interconnection and collaboration become more crucial to businesses, we’re seeing more customers choose Equinix based on the ecosystems that we have built. What matters to them is not just the building itself, but what’s available inside it and how it fits in to customers’ wider strategies.
“No man is an island”, and neither is a business. No organization can thrive in isolation. Collaboration is, and will continue to be, a driver of efficiency in all industries.
For more information about LD6, click here.
Subscribe to the Equinix Blog