In order to help businesses stay in the competition with resilience and future-proofing, Fujitsu created the Power of 3 to not just bring the benefits of going digital, but to help businesses to establish an entire ecosystem of digital innovation and competitive advantage.
Through collaboration with Equinix (the world’s digital infrastructure company that interconnects the foundational infrastructure to power success) combined with Cisco (an authority on network security and SDN connectivity)—the Fujitsu Power of 3 paradigm includes every internal and external stakeholder in the digital transformation.
With this approach, both the Cloud and the digital Edge become a continuum of digital productivity that frees up talent from repetitive administrative tasks to focus on innovation, collaboration and competitive inspiration.
Understanding the Equinix Digital Ecosystem
Digital transformation is not simply about transforming business processes from analog to digital. It’s about enabling global collaboration and customer engagement across multiple digital mobile and social channels.
The powerful paradigm requires shifting your IT architecture from legacy and siloed to integrated and dynamic. It also involves:
- interconnecting scores of globally dispersed application and cloud services
- leveraging digital enablers such as APIs, digital payments and smart contracts
- coping with the overwhelming data demands of the IoT and real-time big data analytics, all while delivering a fast and secure end-user experience
Equinix’s answer to this ultimate form of digital transformation is to re-architect and simplify network topology by deploying an Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA™) strategy.
An IOA is a proven and repeatable architectural framework that directly and securely connects people, locations, clouds and data. IOA is benefiting more than 8,500 companies and it is allowing today’s enterprise and service providers to re-architect their IT infrastructures from siloed and fixed to integrated and dynamic.
Next, a Network Blueprint is customized for the unique IOA needs of every business. This master plan lays out the steps to address latency, bandwidth and security issues by deploying a more distributed network infrastructure out at an enterprise’s digital edge, where population centre (customers, employees, partners) and digital ecosystems (clouds, mobile, social networks, B2B partners) meet.
The IOA distributed network architecture is what defines the Equinix digital ecosystem: one where many digital business/IT functions are moved from a centralised, core enterprise network to strategically located, distributed network “edge nodes”. Each edge node is strategically placed geographically close to customers and dense ecosystems of partner systems, cloud services and network provider peering points.
By aggregating connectivity at a colocation edge node and securely cross-connecting segmented traffic flows, this digital ecosystem can deliver dramatic benefits in sustainable cost reduction, improved performance, and enhanced security. When multiple digital ecosystems link up, the possibilities for scalability, innovation and collaboration become limitless.
Compelling business benefits
The benefits of direct and secure interconnection to digital business ecosystems include:
- Accelerating time-to-productivity and reducing cost: Provisioning dedicated high-speed cross connects among ecosystem players is a much quicker and easier process than provisioning MPLS network connections. Interconnections are made with LAN-like speeds and nearly-unlimited bandwidth / low latencies. This also greatly reduces cost from a traditional MPLS connection model.
- Leveraging cloud velocity: The ecosystem can expand as needed to match changing user needs and demands — by harnessing more flexible, scalable and cost-effective SDN or NFV capabilities within a digital edge node for many-to-many, programmable connections to partners/customers, clouds, applications and data enables.
- Expanding of market opportunities: By removing barriers to expanding access and interconnection to partners/customers at the digital edge, more business opportunities can be recognised and leveraged than ever before. This growth enabler is repeatable in any or all of the global metros and markets where a business and its partners have an edge presence.
- Greater B2B security: Greater security and compliance measures can be applied at local digital edge nodes at network, application and data levels, if there is a foundation for private interconnection between and among partners. This enables control and visibility over all activities-essential attributes of a pervasive security fabric that ensures privacy and compliance.
- Seamless integration and management: As the Equinix system is tightly integrated with Ciscos’ proven Vmanage SD-WAN benefits, Power of 3 users can expect Fujitsu to provide focused, versatile managed infrastructure services customizable to meet the individual needs of each partner.
Furthermore, digital ecosystem players can leverage multiple partners for scaling, or to enable disaster recovery scenarios, and have the option to change partners at will.
In an increasingly collaborative economy, greater interconnection empowers customers to do more than just consume content, it also enables them to produce and distribute content. This is clearly evidenced by other platform companies that leverage ecosystems, such as the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world.
The scope and scale of digital transformation that embraces digital ecosystems makes it critical for businesses to involve an industry leader like Equinix, together in close partnership with Cisco and Fujitsu, in supercharging digital innovation and collaboration.
