In conjunction with MWC Barcelona 2022 which will be taking place from the 28th of February to the 3rd of March, Tara Neal, Executive Editor of The Fast Mode spoke to Ivo Ivanov, Chief Operating Officer of DE-CIX Group AG and Chief Executive Officer of DE-CIX International on the company's plans and showcases for this year's event.
Tara: What do you think MWC 2022 will be all about? And what are your MWC 2022 plans?
Ivo: After a hiatus in 2021 due to the pandemic, it’s great to see that major trade shows like the MWC are taking place again this year. The world has transformed since pre-Covid times, and it’s really exciting to see all of the data-driven innovations currently emerging - these will likely take center stage at the MWC this year. While the pandemic did not cause our current wave of digital transformation, it certainly accelerated it.
As a result, our society is becoming increasingly dependent on a range of both wireless technical innovations. In this context, 5G will play a crucial role. There is much more to 5G than simply “super-fast Internet” for the smartphone - 5G offers enormous potential for a range of industrial and economic sectors. Prominent examples are smart mobility solutions and connected car applications. However, there are also application scenarios in agriculture and construction, the logistics sector, energy production, and in the medical sector.
Added to this, we expect that the digital transformation of the financial services industry will be the topic of discussion at the MWC. Analysts, observers and growth strategists point out that banks are notoriously conservative when it comes to digital innovation and extoll the benefits of digitalising banks. Instead of providing financial services that feed into other vertical industries, such as real estate, retail, or automotive, banks can themselves become the moderator of the entire customer journey through these sectors. At the same time, through digital architectures, they can develop the capacity to sell their products to a wider range of customers through third-party providers. Instead of competing head-on with the FinTechs and tech giants, they want to be able to capitalise on the benefits of partnerships. These ambitions become possible if the banks digitalise their processes and services intelligently.
Our DE-CIX team will also be attending the MWC, and this is a great opportunity to connect with old and new contacts after the long break.
Tara: How has the pandemic impacted the operational and business landscape of the tech segment you are operating in?
Ivo: Never before has more data been exchanged than today. Digital applications that enable communication and collaboration have been key to enduring the pandemic. Globally, we now see a very high demand for digital applications, and these are becoming crucial for enabling business and private life to function, not only in times of crisis. This also highlights the general trend that, as our economy becomes more global, as our planet becomes home to more and more people, and as more regions need to be enabled in terms of communication, the only answer can be digitalisation. So, in the tech landscape of interconnection services, we have seen massive growth in the last two years.
Since the start of Covid-19 in 2020, data throughout the peak times at DE-CIX in Frankfurt – one of the world’s largest Internet Exchanges (IX) – has increased by over 30 percent. In fact, in 2021, DE-CIX’s global infrastructure of owned and operated IXs – which spans across Asia, North America, Europe, and Middle East, handled over 38 exabytes of data throughout; roughly equivalent to the storage capacity of more than 300 million smartphones, each with 128 GB memory. These numbers show that concepts such as work-from-home with video conferencing, and home entertainment with video streaming and gaming, have become established in our everyday life globally – and this growth will only continue.
Having said this, even the best application cannot perform if the underlying digital infrastructure is not as solid, resilient, and secure as possible. Businesses need to be able to quickly, securely, and directly exchange data with their partners and suppliers in order to develop or operate complex digital services – ranging from digital health services to autonomous driving. While cloud solutions facilitate data storage and handling, interconnection platforms are key to enabling many-to-many data exchange.
The global pandemic has taught us how essential a functioning digital infrastructure is. We did not have concerns that the Internet would not be able to withstand the global load during Covid-19 as this is exactly what it was designed for almost 50 years ago. Nevertheless, the further expansion of secure and resilient digital infrastructure must be rapidly pushed forward, globally.
Tara: What emerging trends/technologies have you observed in your tech segment in recent months?
Ivo: One clear trend we see in interconnection is Glocalisation – the need to be globally connected on the one hand, but on the other to exchange data locally via direct interconnection with the relevant networks to keep latency times as low as possible.
Various new technology applications such as virtual reality, cloud gaming, and e-health, not to mention connected and autonomous cars, are creating ever higher demands for the lowest possible latencies. Especially for mobility applications, extremely low latencies of less than one millisecond are crucial. Data does not move infinitely fast, so it is necessary for the nearest data center to be a maximum of around 80 kilometers away. A centralised Internet structure, where exchanges exist only in metropolitan areas, can no longer cope with these developments. Thus, we will see the hosting and processing of data move increasingly closer to the edge – this translates into moving closer to the actual location of the consumers of this data and data processing. We will also see the emergence of new interconnection hubs in tier 2 and 3 cities, away for the major international data hubs.
A second interconnection trend is Automation, which is no longer just a topic in manufacturing. More and more industries are developing solutions to automate routine IT tasks to become more flexible – in uncertain times like we are currently experiencing, flexibility is an extremely crucial asset. If, for example, a retailer’s business activities suddenly shift from the physical store to the online store, they must be able to react quickly so as not to alienate their customers with downtime. Internet Exchange operators are responding by offering the chance to manage interconnection services via both API and self-service portals. This means that the services at the Internet Exchange can be booked just as easily as computing power can be at the well-known cloud providers. This is possible because a large portion of the infrastructure at an Internet Exchange is now virtualised.
Having localised and automated the exchange of data, a third trend is also developing: The enablement of private and secure interconnection ecosystems, separated from the public Internet. One service that is increasingly in demand is Closed User Groups, which allow different actors to connect with their private networks via an IX. Closed User Groups enable enterprises to connect with select partners, suppliers, and customers present in multiple different locations across a distributed interconnection platform, in order to share data securely and efficiently. The interconnection platform provides a direct connection between members of the Closed User Group, with optimised security measures and improved performance. This allows business partners or suppliers to quickly, securely, and directly exchange the data needed to develop or operate complex digital services – ranging from digital health services to autonomous driving.
Ivo A. Ivanov is Chief Operating Officer of the DE-CIX Group AG and also - as Chief Executive Officer of DE-CIX International - responsible for the global business activities of the Internet Exchange Operator. Ivo has more than 15 years of experience in the regulatory, legal and commercial Internet environment.
