The contexts of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things, and digital transformation, have become an array of unstoppable forces that push boundaries in almost every market.

AI offers businesses the promise of efficiency gains of 30 percent in the US and UK – with a pan-European average of 29.5 percent. Even accounting for the brakes being put on by workers' propensity to adopt AI, these gains rank around 19.4 percent in the UK, 18.8 percent in the US, and 18.2 percent across Europe.

Whilst AI has stolen headlines, the Internet of Things (IoT) has continued to grow. IDC figures put the European IoT market at €457 billion by 2024, whilst Forrester predicts that UK IoT will reach £81 billion.

And despite warnings from the World Economic Forum that the Continent is lagging, the European Digital Transformation market is still estimated to reach $390 billion in 2024.

At the level of individual businesses, the share of B2B revenue from digital channels in the UK hit 46 percent in 2023. This is expected to grow, and by 2025, it is projected to be 56 percent.

And underpinning it all, the UK data infrastructure market currently supports over 9,000 companies and is worth more than £127 billion, with a SaaS sector sitting on top of this infrastructure adding a further £89 billion.

Immovable objects

Yet all unstoppable forces are destined to meet immovable objects. Despite this array of driving forces, the attitudes of buyers in this market are clear, consistent, and very familiar.

Recent S&P Global Market Intelligence and 451 Group research found that, amidst the growth of linking AI and IoT devices to the world, the top concerns when purchasing critical connectivity, are the challenges of high costs and the complexities of connecting to multiple silos of data, and working with multiple vendors.

High costs were by far the largest concern and – given the ‘inflation plus x’ price increases of network connectivity in the UK that originated with COVID – it is likely to remain the dominant issue.

The proportion of those who said that the operational complexity of connecting applications to multiple silos of data was a major challenge was 29.8 percent, and 25.6 percent specified the burden of managing connectivity to multiple clouds.

Elsewhere, another 29.2 percent identified the commercial complexity of working with multiple service providers and 25.6 percent cited unpredictable capacity or bandwidth requirements – a core facet of connectivity contracts.

In light of these buy-side attitudes, the question quickly becomes how can the industry enable businesses and organizations to purchase, use, and optimize network-based technologies without being killed by cost, or drowned in complexity?

A collision without damage

Our take on addressing these issues is platformEDGE: Connecting our twelve facilities with a private, high-speed, resilient network to create the most geographically diverse digital infrastructure in the UK. This then extends to the Internet, public clouds, global carriers, and Peering Exchanges for further national and international connection. The objective is low-latency connectivity to all major metros in the UK.

PlatformEDGE enables businesses to access over six hundred connectivity, ISP, and cloud providers across the UK and globally via Megaport’s SDN services. This ‘ecosystem at the edge’ means that businesses capitalize on competition to cut costs, remain flexible as they grow, and avoid vendor lock-in.

The objective is less cost, complexity, silos, and risk. Making connected digital infrastructure more accessible for regional business is critical if they are going to benefit from the £78.3 billion UK AI market or the £9 billion IoT sector. But that colocation and connectivity must be without compromise between reach, availability, resilience, or performance.

To find out more about how Pulsant platformEDGE can help deliver all of these to your business, visit our site here.