OREANDA-NEWS. July 13, 2016. As the enterprise workforce becomes more and more “borderless,” cloud-based collaboration and productivity applications are becoming more critical to enterprise success.

Talkin’ Cloud’s “Top 100 Cloud Service Providers” report shows collaboration and productivity applications (e.g., Microsoft Office 365 and Citrix GoToMeeting) in the top five Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications accessed by enterprises. The digital workplace depends on these types of latency-sensitive applications and on the delivery of a superior user experience enabled by fast, secure interconnections among globally dispersed employees, offices, business partners and cloud services.

As described in our recent white paper, “Changing the Way We Collaborate With an Interconnection Oriented Architecture,” today’s enterprises need to transform their IT infrastructures to collaborate more efficiently and at higher performance levels, while providing the reliability and security required to effectively increase user productivity anywhere, on any device.

Blurry boundaries

Accenture reports that 81% of 2,000 global business and technology executives see industry boundaries blurring as collaboration platforms reshape industries into interconnected ecosystems. As collaboration trends evolve and new solutions and ways of working are brought to market, they are putting immense stress on legacy network architectures. Traditional enterprise and service provider network infrastructures, which are typically comprised of individual long-distance, corporate-centric Internet VPN and MPLS connections, simply were not built to handle the level of collaboration today’s organizations need to compete.

It’s not only enterprises that are feeling the pain. Cloud and network service providers, including content delivery networks, are struggling to support their enterprise customers as their requirements for high-performance, reliable, agile and secure collaborative infrastructures grow. To meet these needs and create unique, value-added services in a commodity cloud market, they need to take their interconnection capabilities to the next level.

By putting interconnection first in their cloud strategies, enterprises and cloud service providers can take full advantage of cloud-based collaboration and productivity applications. They can do that by harnessing the power of an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA™), a proven and repeatable engagement model that provides a blueprint that both enterprises and service providers can leverage to directly and securely connect people, locations, clouds and data.

An Interconnection Oriented Architecture Strategy – A Distributed Hub-Based Architecture

For enterprises, an IOA interconnects employees, partners and customers to what they need, in the right context, using the devices, channels and services they prefer. For service providers, an IOA gives enterprise customers more direct and secure access to clouds, networks and collaboration and productivity apps and services. For businesses of all kinds, this powerful level of direct interconnection allows you to react in real time, adapt quickly to change, and leverage digital ecosystems (e.g., supply chains, peer-to-peer sharing, clouds) to create new value and growth.