Getting over the IT hurdle with Over the Wire
We are living and experiencing the 4th industrial revolution – the cyber physical age. It is undoubtedly the most exciting time in human history, and it is rife with opportunity for organisations of all shapes and sizes to disrupt and prosper.
It’s possible to prosper in every industry vertical but none more so than in the ICT channel where “digital transformation” is the single most important focus of every business large and small. Irrespective of how far or wide an organisation’s transformation strategy goes, parts of their business will need to undergo a digital revamp.
Megatrends such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, mobile 5G, augmented reality and artificial intelligence offer unprecedented opportunity for organisations to create productivity improvements, cost efficiencies and enhanced customer experiences.
This is where the ICT channel companies plays a pivotal role through their ability to consult, guide and assist customers throughout the complex change process as data becomes the new oil; the most valuable commodity on the planet.
In addition to the bottom-line business benefits, digital innovation is helping organisations to manage growth better, consolidate the number of suppliers they use and integrate data from disparate systems and locations into a single, organisation-wide view accessible from anywhere on any device.
However, with this great opportunity to improve business, come new challenges and complexities; obstacles that see failure rates for organisational change estimated to be as high as 80%. There are many and varied reasons why digital transformation projects often fail with a lack of overarching strategy and limited access to the required technical expertise sitting at the top of the tree.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are companies that have proven track records of being able to straddle the multiple trials and tribulations of a digital transformation journey to help their customers arrive at their desired destinations. One such partner is Over the Wire (OTW), an ASX-500 business who is a national provider of intelligent telecommunications and IT solutions, assisting organisations to leverage the opportunities afforded by an effective digital transformation strategy.
Over the Wire and NEXTDC: A Strategic Partnership
The relationship with OTW began in 2011, when they joined the NEXTDC ecosystem by moving into our first data centre built in Brisbane. As NEXTDC’s business grew, so too did our national footprint. By 2016 we were planning our second-generation of data centres, a pivotal moment in our business where we would expand from one data centre per region to multiple data centres. Connecting our footprint within the same metropolitan area to the highest reliability and security standards was pivotal, and it was at this time NEXTDC identified the need to call on the expertise of our own partner ecosystem to help us get there. In 2016 we collaborated with Comlinx, the managed services arm of OTW, enlisting their specialist knowledge to help us design and build our Data Centre Interconnect (DCI) platform which connects customers seamlessly between our same city data centres.
OTW and Comlinx continue to work with NEXTDC, helping us to build cutting edge network solutions that allow us to seamlessly integrate new sites as our business continues to grow. The value our data centres and the ecosystem that operates amongst them applies as much to us as our customers. As a real-life use case scenario, The OTW group has helped NEXTDC undertake that same digital transformation journey that our data centre services enable for our wider customer and partner ecosystem.
The power of the ecosystem: Delivering cutting edge innovation
NEXTDC has built one of Australia’s most extensive and diverse partner ecosystems that includes public and private cloud providers, telecommunication carriers, integrators, outsourcers, managed service providers and as-a-Service providers.
The value we place on our ecosystem extends beyond the value and collaboration opportunities we present to our customers. The depth and breadth of skill within our ecosystem has equally enabled us to transform our business faster, which assists us in better servicing our customers and achieving the objectives most critical to our business.
As with all successful businesses servicing the digital needs of customers, OTW has been evolving and honing its capabilities with the industry so that it can leverage the latest technology megatrends. It has always been at the forefront of delivering outstanding solutions that enable its clients to disrupt, compete and delight their customers.
At the core of OTW’s success has been its ability to leverage connected ecosystems such as those housed within NEXTDC’s data centres. They use intelligent network and infrastructure management tools to aggregate all the diversity offered into a single end-to-end solution that covers cloud platforms, cloud solutions and carrier services. It wraps all this functionality available from within and peripheral to our ecosystem into secure, flexible and agile service offerings.
At NEXTDC, we love working with partners such as OTW. It’s a tag-team type of relationship that helps to enable digital excellence for the Australian economy. Our focus on data centre excellence creates a superior experience at our facilities. In turn, this allows OTW to provide flexible, customised digital solutions for their clients who are then able to deliver innovative customer engagement.
Networking superhero’s
OTW provides that far-reaching aggregated, intelligent voice and data network capability upon which it can enable hosted infrastructure and innovative, carefully designed IT solutions that make its customers smarter, more agile and more competitive.
Our facilities house all the power, security and connectivity OTW needs to build and deploy its innovative solutions that in-turn create competitive opportunities for their customers to keep pace with and disrupt entrenched players in their marketplaces.
OTW achieves this through aggregating telco services into a single, integrated intelligent network and through building bespoke solutions at the front-end that leverage the full power of a seamlessly connected network.
So how does this translate into true customer benefit? OTW’s model replaces the need for organisations to have multiple carrier services to connect distributed environments across multiple sites. OTW has built its own infrastructure that extends to over 50 points of presence (PoPs) and, most critically, over 30 wholesale carrier arrangements – both wired and wireless – around Australia and New Zealand.
OTW has also leveraged cutting edge SD-WAN (software defined wide-area network) technologies which allows it to offer enhanced visibility and traffic flow management not previously available with traditional technologies. A significant outcome from this is that it enables customer access to in-depth network performance statistics and dual-path traffic flow for true redundancy. This ultimately results in OTW’s customers driving optimal network performance and greater assurances that critical services, managed on a per-application basis, achieve their desired prsuiority; A win-win for everyone!
Partnerships that work
To us, this is a classic example of how an effective transformation strategy built on a truly flexible digital platform, can revolutionise the ability of a business of any size to rapidly and effectively drive competitive advantage within their respective industry. The way organisations like OTW are achieving this kind of rapid success is through strategic partnering and embracing the connected digital ecosystems enabled by premium colocation data centres like NEXTDC.
If you are an ICT partner driving transformation opportunities to your customers, who are champing at the bit to create outstanding customer experiences, you need to reach out to NEXTDC to find out how we can remove the barriers to success.
