INTERVIEW
JUSTIN DUSTZADEH,
KEN MOIR,
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, EQUINIX.
VICE PRESIDENT MARKETING, NICELABEL.
According to IDC, by 2023, more than 50% of new enterprise infrastructure deployments will be at the edge rather than corporate data centers.
Driven by the latest evolution of the Internet of Things IoT, printers themselves will increasingly become connected.
There is a seismic shift underway across many industries as businesses are embracing edge computing and hybrid multicloud architectures. Increasingly, businesses are moving computing from centralised data centers to a distributed infrastructure and toward the edge, where data exchange and interconnection between businesses and cloud services are growing at an exponential rate. The advent of edge computing has also become a foundational enabler for other emerging technologies such as 5G mobile communications, which will allow internet of things IoT and other edge devices to take advantage of faster connectivity to data and compute resources with single-digit-millisecond network latency. According to analyst firm IDC, by 2023, more than 50% of new enterprise infrastructure deployments will be at the edge rather than corporate data centers, up from less than 10% today. And by 2024, the number of apps at the edge will increase 800%. The IDC report says to prepare, businesses must modernise IT to become virtualised, containerised and software-defined to support the edge. And they should also consider new data center partners that can bolster edge build-out and prioritise infrastructure optimisation and application communication costs. With the increase in cybersecurity attacks and data privacy and protection regulations, most companies are now moving toward accessing cloud services over private networks and storing their encryption keys in a cloud-based Hardware Security Module at a location that is separate from where their data resides. This HSM-as-a-Service model allows them to increase the level of control over their data, to strengthen resiliency of operations, and to support of a hybrid technology architecture. 42% of IT decision-makers agree that the greenness of a company’s suppliers has a direct impact on their buying decisions. Equinix anticipates that with increasing pressures on the world’s resources and the increasing desire by many companies to cut emissions, digital transformation could begin to set the world’s economy on a progressively sustainable footing.
As we look ahead to 2020 and beyond, it is clear that the labeling market is being driven by the broader IT trends of digitisation and modernisation. These trends are fueling the development of the market and will accelerate over time. In enterprise resource planning ERP, for example, this combination of digitisation and modernisation is transforming systems, with SAP software solutions in use today rapidly migrating from SAP ECC into the new business suite of SAP S 4HANA. That is just one example but it is important because it is part of a wider IT modernisation trend that ultimately impacts on labeling. When large enterprises update ERP, one of the natural consequences is that they will subsequently modernise their labeling systems and often migrate to, or implement a new standardised global labeling solution. In other words, the impact on labeling is part of a wider chain of events driving IT modernisation. And that chain is accelerating as new technology comes on stream. That is why we are seeing a pipeline of new opportunities for global labeling solutions or label management systems today across the industry that is larger than we have witnessed for many years. And we expect to see these trends speed up not just during 2020 but increasingly throughout the decade. In fact, driven by the latest evolution of the Internet of Things, the printers themselves will increasingly become connected. The technological capability has been in place before but the rest of the market has not been advanced enough to take advantage. Over the next decade, the advent of driverless printers in the cloud will be a key benefit for businesses as the migration to the cloud gathers pace.
JA N U A R Y 2 0 2 0
MEA
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