How often have you discussed the question “how can we increase our revenue?” Of course, this is a key question for almost every executive. Whether you are at a private company answering to your investors or a public company reporting on revenue quarterly, revenue growth is one of the most common topics during management meetings.
Until recently, the answer to grow revenue for almost any retail business was to add new locations. This works just a well for data center operators as for your favorite store in the local mall. A new location increases customer access to your product and hence increases revenue. In addition, expanding locations helps diversify the revenue stream so that any downside effects are localized.
The rise of online business has made it much easier to increase revenue by focusing on e-commerce since it allows a business to reach so many more customers. But it has also created new risks that didn’t exist before. As stated very well in a recent whitepaper from QTS DataCenters:
“As businesses embrace the digital shift, their revenue profiles have also evolved and a higher percentage of revenue is generated through online means. This shift means companies are exposed to greater risk. According to Gartner and a recent ITIC survey, 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000, and 33% of those enterprises reported that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1-5 million. These figures have been growing in recent years and will continue to grow.”
E-commerce has grown so well because the infrastructure has been put in place to make it appear seamless. The performance of systems that work 99% of the time can be taken for granted. After all, the system likely works so well that most employees may never have had to deal with a failure. But as demonstrated with the recent issue in the Suez Canal where a large container ship was blown in the bank and blocked traffic through this critical shipping channel for almost a week, things work well until they don’t. How will your enterprise handle a failure, especially when your customers’ revenue critical depends on your infrastructure?
For data center operators, Telescent has developed their Network Topology Manager (NTM) that uses a robot to remotely configure and reconfigure cross connects in minutes. While the primary purpose of the NTM is to manage customer cross connects during reconfigurations, the NTM also includes diagnostic capabilities such as power monitoring and an optional OTDR. With the functions, the NTM can initially assess the cause of issues and then reconfigure the connection for restoration after a failure. The all-fiber design of the NTM means that all connections in the Telescent NTM are low-loss, latched and economical. The Telescent system is designed in a pay-as-you-grow model and can be scaled from as few as 144 ports to >10,000 ports while still preserving the ability for any-to-any connectivity. This allows the system to grow in a way that matches revenue.
When many of your data center customers risk millions of dollars of revenue per hour due to downtime, isn’t it worth investing in the Telescent NTM to insure a rapid recovery in the case of a failure?
