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User Experience is Everything (ALMOST)

August 5, 2020

Whether you’re delivering, content & digital media, cloud & IT services, emerging tech, or gaming, user experience is everything to your customers. You gain competitive edge by delivering the best user experience. You keep competitive edge by delivering the best user experience cost efficiently.

That’s the premise of our new EdgeBook, User Experience Is Everything (Almost). You can get the highlights below, but check out the full animated version as well.

“You gain competitive edge by delivering the best user experience. You keep competitive edge by delivering the best user experience cost efficiently.”  Click to Tweet

Speed

Whether it’s a streaming video, a cloud-based game, a business app, an IoT sensor, mobile apps or something else, users expect it to be fast. Delivering on that need for speed demands a combination of geographic proximity and network connectivity.

But that’s hard to achieve given that the vast majority of users in the world – 7.5 billion, to be exact – are outside low latency range of a major data center market (as ranked this year by Cushman & Wakefield). The solution is a data center partner that can help you get close to your end users, wherever they are.

“7.5 billion of your potential users are outside the low latency range of a ‘top’ data center.”  Click to Tweet

Connectivity also plays a part in ensuring low latency. But regional cloud architectures mean slower performance away from local nodes. There, connectivity solutions like cloud on-ramps can provide tremendous performance improvements (87% in one case leveraging  a Cloud on-ramp at our data center in Portland).

Learn more about ensuring your users get the access they need, as fast as they need it, in the animated EdgeBook User Experience Is Everything (Almost).

Power

In a range of cases – from VR and gaming to industrial IoT and predictive analytics, among others – users want to be able to leverage the latest and greatest technologies. These are power-intensive technologies like machine learning and AI that can require densities of 25 kW per rack or higher. Ideally you’d have a data center partner that could support those high densities without bloating the footprint or adding in additional cooling systems. (Traditional data centers can typically only support 5-10 kW per rack.)

The ability to support power densities up to 40 kW on a standard footprint with standard containment solutions is one reason Nvidia chose EdgeConneX as a DGX-Ready Data Center partner. As Tony Paikeday, Nvidia’s director of product marketing for DGX systems explained it, “AI is now essential to business success, and EdgeConneX’s colocation offerings ensure that customers can deploy their DGX systems in an environment optimized for high-performance GPU workloads.”

Do your data center partners enable you to support the kind of compute-intensive applications that are key to winning with users? Take our 5-minute assessment to see.

Availability

It’s said that slow is the new down, and we know that getting the access they’re looking for the instant they’re looking for it is key to a great user experience. But down is still down, and there’s probably no worse user experience than not being able to access the application at all. It can easily drive users away – forever.

Downtime can be caused by a variety of factors, of course, but one common cause is when demand outstrips supply. In a world where user demand can increase by 1900% in a matter of days (as happened to Zoom at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic), or when launch-day demand can be 50x estimates (as happened to Niantic when it released Pokémon GO), the ability to scale capacity fast is essential.

Can you support short-term bursts and quickly get long-term capacity? Learn more about the role of scalable capacity in meeting users’ expectations, and how to achieve it, in the animated EdgeBook User Experience Is Everything (Almost).

“Down is still down, and there’s probably no worse user experience than not being able to access the application at all.”
Click to Tweet

Where’s Your Edge?

The internet as it is currently architected is not set up to cost efficiently deliver speed, power, and availability. So, what’s required is a re-architecture of the internet, to a more distributed architecture. In addition to cutting latency and costs, a distributed architecture enables you to better align supply with user demand.

This is the edge – distributed compute, storage, and/or network capacity at whatever scale and location you need to cost-efficiently deliver the best experience for your users. From hyperlocal to hyperscale, flexible data center solutions that are optimized for particular workloads given latency requirements and cost constraints are essential in helping re-architecting the internet. Peering at the edge and local gateways enable high speed connectivity between edge deployments and to/from the core.

Gartner has found that using edge topological ideas can cut WAN costs by half, while improving user experience by 200%. Now that’s a competitive edge.

For Additional Resources to Help You Get and Keep Your Competitive Edge, Visit The UX Content Hub:

1. Infographic
2. Assessment Tool
3. Interactive EdgeBook