Just as steam engines, generators, computers, and the Internet revolutionized society before, new 5G, AI, and cloud-driven technologies are doing the same.

Cloud services are a shared economy in the IT industry, while data centers are the carriers of these services. Due to limited land resources and equipment room space, data centers are increasingly deployed in a distributed manner, requiring WDM technology to connect them to provide unified services.

Data center interconnect (DCI) serves as the foundation of enterprise digital transformation. DCI networks carry increasing amounts of services and require higher reliability.

With the rapid development of big data, cloud computing, and mobile Internet, more and more enterprises are opting to build multiple data centers, with the traffic between them steadily increasing.

The construction of enterprise-built DCI networks is key for the digital transformation of finance, government, and enterprise industries.

Expansion of enterprise data centers brings forward the need for high-capacity, high-quality, flexible, and scalable connectivity. Driven by these requirements, enterprises across different verticals are migrating towards self-built and self-managed data center interconnect (DCI).
The needs of enterprises, however, also dictate other features of evolving DCI solutions: simple and automated operations, administration, and management as well as simplification of network architecture.

In modern times, the data center interconnect (DCI) domain is undergoing an innovation similar to the above-mentioned development from professional computers to PCs. Currently, the surges of DCI traffic are leading to an exponential increase in leased line costs, which severely suppresses the bandwidth requirements of various digital transformation applications. Given this, an increasing number of financial companies, governments, and large enterprises are considering building their own DCI networks.

Over the past decade, data center services have shifted from web-centric to cloud-centric. Today, they are shifting from the era of cloud computing and into the intelligent era.

As we move towards Digital Transformation 2.0, digitalization has become the foundation of enterprise survival, rather than just a means of cost reduction and efficiency improvement. In this era of digitality, data centers have become a source of value creation. According to a report of Equinix, a leading global data carrier, the compound annual growth rate of data center interconnect (DCI) traffic is 51% from 2018 to 2022, projecting a new round of exponential growth for data centers.