iMiller Public Relations recently sat down with Global Capacity’s Chief Revenue Officer, Ben Edmond, to discuss how and why cloud and network are necessarily intertwined within today’s marketplace. Here are his thoughts: 
iMPR: From your perspective, what is the overall cloud outlook for 2014 and beyond?
BE: The cloud marketplace continues to explode, with deployment growing over 32 percent last year alone. By 2015, end-user 
spending on cloud services is expected to surpass $180 billion. We’re also seeing a fundamental shift in where business applications are sitting, moving from traditional client server architecture and the four walls of the enterprise to third-party data centers, or the ‘cloud’. Gartner predicts that by 2015, 35 percent of IT spending actually takes place outside of IT; by the end of the decade, this figure is expected to top 90 percent. This is driving unprecedented demand into the network platform as well as into the data center. The customer for cloud solutions has changed from IT to the end-user. With this shift, the network becomes a critical facet in the delivery of the user experience.
While we are seeing more enterprises transition from traditional IT to ‘as-a-service’ models, statistics show that total compute power migrated to the cloud last year accounts for approximately 17 percent. This creates big opportunity for today’s network and cloud providers as well as the industry as a whole to align and develop solutions that effectively serve the collective marketplace.
iMPR: Why do network and cloud providers need to partner? How does this help the enterprise and ultimately, the end-user?
BE: Because the quality of the customer experience no longer relies on just the application or network alone, cloud application owners and network service providers have become interdependent. We’ve come full circle from our invention of cloud architecture in the 1960s, centralizing core components of compute, placing them where they can be maintained and run effectively, and leveraging network and connectivity to extend those benefits to the end-users – no matter where they are located.
As the network, user experience and compute infrastructure continue to become more intertwined, network and cloud providers need to come together to form aggregated, multi-cloud solutions to help competitive operators and global enterprises leverage the benefits of cloud services. In today’s cloud market, it’s all about interaction and collaboration – creating the standards and processes to keep up with and enable the cloud and business growth that is sought after by our customers.
iMPR: How are enterprises deploying cloud solutions today?
BE: While public cloud has been a popular topic in the media and press, more companies are leveraging a hybrid approach – or a combination of public and private cloud – as well as physical infrastructure to deploy their cloud solutions. Today’s cloud is an ecosystem of networks, enterprises, data centers and applications; no one platform is the end all, be all. The aggregate, multi-cloud approach ensures companies are evaluating and implementing the network and IT infrastructure resources their applications need in order to most effectively interact with end-users.
iMPR: What is Global Capacity’s role in accelerating application delivery in the cloud?
Global Capacity is a leading network connectivity company that helps enterprise customers build a less complex, lower cost service delivery environment via our One Marketplace. The platform combines a physically interconnected and aggregated access network with a Cloud application that automates the procurement of connectivity services.
As businesses consume more cloud and move specific compute resources to that architecture, we enable them to access it from wherever they are located. In addition to meeting growing customer demand for network connectivity, Global Capacity is also empowering consumption of cloud services, applications and IT services by forging partnerships with leading public cloud, data center and Ethernet organizations such as Equinix, Amazon Web Services and Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).
iMPR: Can you elaborate on Global Capacity’s partnerships and how they benefit your customers?
Our partnership with Equinix combines One Marketplace and Platform Equinix™ to allow customers access to the hundreds of physical networks within the Equinix ecosystem. In addition to enabling connectivity to Equinix’s platform inside the data center, we empower the consumption of cloud services, applications and IT services found in Equinix’s rich ecosystem outside of its facilities. We’ve also built private connectivity to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which enables us to provide a dedicated, high-performance connection between AWS and customers’ data centers, offices or co-location environments. Lastly, Global Capacity enables the real-time design, pricing and ordering of high-performance computer networking technologies like Carrier Ethernet, which is widely used for connecting to the cloud because of it its scalable, high-speed connectivity capability and lower cost that legacy services. We’re also an active member of the MEF.
Mr. Edmond will be discussing the aggregated, multi-cloud strategy and its role in the transformation of enterprise networks on the panel Executive Perspectives – The Ethernet-Enabled Cloud Ecosystem: Fueling Innovation & Productivity Gains in the Digital Enterprise at the Global Ethernet Networking 2014 (GEN14) conference in Washington, D.C. To discuss enabling your company’s cloud connectivity, meet with Global Capacity at the MEF GEN14 event.