Interview: Jeremy Deutsch, Equinix Australia

1. Which technologies or innovations do you think will be game changers or reach maturity in 2018?

The rise of digital payment applications will continue to evolve the payments landscape. Technologies that are easing P2P transactions and enabling mobile wallets are providing new ways for businesses, banks and consumers to move money and pay for goods and services. Although the traditional debit/credit and cash options still prevail in some markets, the ecosystem that uses them has vastly expanded due to mobile technologies and open APIs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has continued to grow and develop since its inception, and new technologies and deployments will be embedded across all industries. Smart Cities and the Industrial Internet will need IoT technologies to come to fruition while IoT plays a key part in creating and collecting our ever-expanding world of data.

For businesses to access, analyse and protect the IoT data explosion, real-time, direct and secure interconnection is required.

2. Which ICT innovations or disruptions are your customers telling you they are most worried or enthusiastic about in the year ahead?

Over the last couple of years, businesses have been going through digital transformation and were looking at where they needed to be now but also where they would need to be in the future. In Australia we are seeing increased uptake of hybrid and multi-cloud as companies connect to multiple networks to accelerate their business processes and innovation.

Equinix provides interconnection with cloud exchange services to allow customers to connect with other cloud providers, such as Amazon and Microsoft, in one location. It is important for companies to think about how they build their architecture now so they can then replicate it in other markets and set themselves up to accelerate innovation. This will dramatically increase their opportunities to capture more market and drive business productivity.

3. What will be the biggest growth opportunities for your company and your customers in 2018, and why?

The growth of IoT, cloud, AI, security, and mobile trends is creating a proliferation of data and the need for interconnection. Businesses are trying to integrate and manage multi-cloud environments, application development tools, distributed data sources and new dynamic data types with workflow and data analytics engines to increase productivity and reveal business insights faster, all of which can prove to be a challenge. Enterprises are looking to outsource to solve their multi-cloud management problems.

The Asia–Pacific region expects to see more than four-fold growth in interconnection by 2020 as digital business embraces the ability to share private data and conduct scalable business. Interconnection enables new opportunities for businesses to leverage new technologies and spur greater innovation.

4. What’s on your tech wish list from industry, regulators and innovators in 2018?

• As the workforce is now well and truly steeped in digital technologies, we need to enable the ability to interconnect so businesses can accelerate their productivity and innovation abilities.
• The deployment of new submarine cables in 2017 has been exciting for Equinix as we support the landing points for these connections that enable companies to share data between different countries, as well as implementation of additional submarine cables.
• Equinix hopes companies changing their IT architecture will really consider the locations they need upfront and choose the most cost-effective and secure environment to gain access to the many platforms and services required for business efficiency and accelerated innovation. For businesses to become leading companies in their industries they need to think and leverage interconnection.

With over 16 years’ experience in the ICT industry, Jeremy Deutsch is responsible for the overall performance and expansion of Equinix’s business and operations in Australia. Prior to Equinix, Deutsch was General Manager Products at Unwired, managing product strategy, alliance partnerships and user experience delivery. Deutsch holds a Bachelor of Economics and Information Systems from the University of New South Wales.