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Overcoming pain points to maximize the reach and speed up time-to-market Companies, especially OTT provid- ers, are braced with a series of pain points when it comes to taking full advantage of such a technological revolution. Three of the main notions include the ability to capture business opportunities, increase the market share and implement the necessary infrastruc- ture and systems fast and extensively. Speed is the name of the game. It is what the financial industry needs to make money or what remote surgeons need to save lives. For the OTTs, the skill to leverage it all is the difference in growing their own footprints, building revenues and growing and retaining customer bases. Take financial trading as an example. Since the mid-2000s, traders have been shifting their systems rapid- ly closer to Wall Street in successful attempts to reduce latency. For this industry, time is literally money as one millisecond can be worth as much as $100 million. Or take an OTT brand that would like to launch and extend its services to more than five regions – perhaps Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. This company would need to deliver services by establishing hundreds of servers and reach more than 10 million end users within weeks. Questions this OTT might ask would be: how can it reach local mobile network operators (MNO) and internet service providers (ISP) quick- ly; how can it reach an edge PoP fast; and does it have enough knowledge to understand the local environment? The answers lie in simplification. A lot of businesses struggle in their quest to do business outside the borders where they were founded because they attempt to build their whole ecosystem themselves. Companies like HGC put in place the necessary infrastructure and systems to handle such expansion requests that OTTs have in their globalization and localiza- tion expansion roadmaps. HGC acts as an aggregator and single contact point for OTTs to reach end users quickly as the infrastructure is well established with interconnection to local carriers, ISPs and MNOs. This results in OTTs being able to reach many users in a multitude of geogra- phies at the switch of a button. Despite all the incredible applica- tions of edge computing and 5G, a key part of this evolution in how we connect our world and ourselves rests on how we build, deploy and maintain those ecosystems. A big part of that relies on software defined networks (SDN), the usage of automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and other self- learning, self-sufficient technologies. Reaching eyeballs Ultimately, a business must under- stand how this new wave of data processing and application delivery can best work for it. How can that data provide better insights? How and where will edge computing give a boost in revenues? How can a compa- ny benefit from 5G? And ultimately, how does one manage it all in an ever- growing complex ICT ecosystem? HGC is a leading expert in deploy- ing an edge data center in multiple locations across Asia-Pacific, Europe and beyond. A robust fiber network also needs to be considered to connect it all – subsea and terrestrial – enabling the use case for 5G. An OTT, for example, likely would prefer a company that has a mapped edge computing ecosystem with the opportunity of reaching hundreds of millions of users. In the past, businesses have wanted to reach as many people as possible with local ISP content on a one-by-one basis. This is time consuming and extremely costly in addition to slowing down rapid expansion, be it within a single market or several markets. This is where a one-stop service becomes key to reaching as many end users as possible. This one-stop service would include a provider with fiber networks, ISP agreements, and an edge computing and data center footprint, to name but a few. This is what HGC call “Eyeballs-as- a-Service.” From one content point you can reach 90 percent of other points. For example, if you are an enterprise or OTT in the South East Asia region, through an Eyeballs-as-a-Service platform, you can reach users in that region, and in several other cities and countries around the world. In the past, people put their computers in the data center. Now they want it in the frontend, close to user, and they want to be able to manage it. HGC manages those platforms through one-stop shop deployment and mainte- nance managed services. MOBILE & WIRELESS Source: Heavy Reading; Red Hat How many network edge cloud locations do support now, and will support in 2023? Less than 100 100-999 1,000-9,999 10,000 or more 71% 18% 48% 21% 8% 28% 1% 6% 2020 2023 30 CHANNEL V ISION | July - August 2021