Technology influencers gathered last week to attend the London Technology Week’s festival of events, which spanned the city and drew participants from multiple industries, including Equinix.
Our headline event, “Innovation Through Interconnection,” featured speakers from Google, LEGO Group, TRL, Oracle and GE Healthcare. They shed light on the challenges, opportunities and potential for innovation through greater collaboration and interconnection.
Moving IoT from the consumer to the industrial
The Internet of Things (IoT) was a hot topic. This technology, which first could have been taken as a ploy to collect more data on customers to better sell to them, is now powering the transformation of industries to deliver improved outcomes across their supply chains. Healthcare is a great example of this.
According to Grand View Research, the global market for IoT healthcare technology will top $400 billion in 2022, driven by the IoT’s ability to gather and analyze more data about patient health and treatments. Of course, this can’t happen without a platform that connects disparate devices across geographies securely and reliably. During the event Nuno Godhino, GE Healthcare’s GM and CTO of Software in Europe, explained how the new GE Health Cloud ecosystem will help clinicians deliver better outcomes.
The GE Health Cloud provides an open platform for third parties (including competitors) to connect and collaborate in a new healthcare specific ecosystem. Not only will it connect 500,000 GE Healthcare imaging machines, this cloud platform will allow developers, hospitals, academic institutions and manufacturers to come together from anywhere to improve patient care.
GE partnered with Equinix to bring this to life, as the data gathering and logging needs to be centered on an IT infrastructure close to public clouds, with sufficient storage, processing capabilities and network interconnectivity.
Data transforming transportation
Healthcare is just one industry being propelled by the IoT. The transportation industry is realizing how data will revolutionize the way we drive, monitor our airplanes, and even insure our vehicles.
Iwan Parry, head of insurance at TRL, explored the possibilities of the UK as a driverless society. During a presentation, he explained why insurance companies, car manufacturers and drivers will have to innovate through collaboration to overcome safety, security and societal challenges. Leading UK businesses are examining the data requirements needed to support autonomous navigation, and this project will use TRL’s UK Smart Mobility Living Lab to safely transform transport systems and ultimately save lives.
These innovations and collaborations are being enabled through the IoT, cloud and big data, and are placing greater demands on connectivity. As Godhino noted in his talk, there’s one clear way to meet them: “Interconnection is key in making IoT and the Industrial Internet a reality.”
Creating competitive advantage in the digital economy
These stories from London Tech Week all point to a massive shift in the way global businesses transact. As businesses grow increasingly interdependent and cloud-enabled and depend on social, mobile, cloud, IoT and analytics to compete, the demands placed on connectivity will reach a new high. Future success and competitive advantage depends on interconnection.
Many interconnected enterprises today are already using Equinix to shift their IT architectures from siloed and centralized to interconnected and distributed, unlocking opportunities to collaborate and innovate. From LEGO Group digitalizing on Platform Equinix to avoid complex IT administration, to Oracle being on Equinix’s Cloud Exchange to expand its global customer base, competitive advantages are being created by collaboration in business ecosystems that connect people, places and devices.
At Equinix, we provide the colocation and interconnection platform that enables this, Platform Equinix™. Our interconnection capabilities are instant, direct, secure and massively scalable across 40 markets. That’s why companies are coming together inside Equinix to accelerate their business performance and realize new opportunities.
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