OREANDA-NEWS. August 16, 2016. Metcalfe’s Law says, “The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users to the system.” The law formulated by Robert Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet, is often cited as an explanation for the rapid growth of the Internet. It underscores the increasing value of interconnection as more and more systems and people are connected to each other.

Gartner analyst Bob Gill explores how this theory can be put into practice to accelerate digital business in Gartner’s recent report,“Colocation-Based Interconnection Will Serve as the ‘Glue’ for Advanced Digital Business Applications”. As Gill points out, “The ability to integrate multiple applications, data types and data sources in a secure, predictable, lower-latency fashion will spell the difference between digital business success and failure.”

We agree with Gartner’s assessment, having helped more than 8,000 businesses worldwide to seamlessly integrate their digital and physical worlds within our global colocation data centers. Increasingly, our customers are leveraging hybrid IT to manage their enterprise resources and assets in the cloud, alongside their on-premises and colocation infrastructures. And with the expansion of hybrid IT in digital business, we’ve also seen our customers’ reliance and expectations around interconnection expand.

Gill explains: “Digital business is closely related to digital infonomics, which assigns economic value to digital information and develops frameworks to manage digital information assets. Digital business then, is based on the interconnection of enterprises, partners and service providers.”

At Equinix, we have witnessed an increased interdependency among business peers and partners within vertical industry ecosystems, such as financial services and media and entertainment, and horizontal industry ecosystems made up of network, cloud and IT service providers. For example, our customers are expanding multi-cloud deployments mainly because no single cloud provider can possibly meet all of their various workload or application requirements. This trend not only increases the demand for more flexible, agile and high-speed interconnection between the enterprise and its cloud providers, but also between multiple cloud providers. And going back to Metcalfe, the increased connectivity between multiple entities, increases the value that interconnection can bring to digital business.

This is why we are working with our enterprise and service provider customers on deploying interconnection-first strategies that enable private direct and secure connectivity between people, locations, clouds and data.

Gill describes this approach as follows: “When we combine interconnection with high-speed enterprise access to the multitenant data center (for example, Ethernet over fiber), and include enterprise assets such as compute, storage and, in particular, networking, located in the multitenant data center, what we’ve done is bring the enterprise and its applications to the network, as opposed to the outdated model of bringing the network to the enterprise.”

Our customers also require data center interconnection that is as flexible and agile as the dynamic digital assets that are being integrated within their businesses. This is why they are increasingly gravitating to a multi-cloud interconnection solution, which uses high-speed, low-latency switching and API-based software-defined networking to establish programmable, virtualized connections between enterprises and multiple networks and clouds.

Our customers’ experiences illustrate Gill’s conclusion that “As data center interconnect fabrics become more prevalent, and their APIs standardized and written to, the dynamism and speed of these connections will foster the development of even more useful applications.”

We are seeing first-hand how our customers are leveraging this data center interconnect fabric model to provide the “glue” that not only interconnects digital business, but also elevates its value.

Download Gartner’s “Colocation-Based Interconnection Will Serve as the ‘Glue’ for Advanced Digital Business Applications” report.