The concept of the metaverse dates back decades, but the excitement around it has never been greater than it is now. Facebook kicked off the movement when it announced its new Meta brand, signaling that it would base the company’s future on the metaverse. Several other metaverse announcements have followed in quick succession. Most recently, Microsoft spoke about its plan to acquire Activision Blizzard, saying it will “provide the building blocks for the metaverse.”
It’s easy to get excited about the possibilities of the metaverse: Automotive engineers can perform virtual crash tests (no test dummies required); major retailers are expanding to sell virtual goods and cryptocurrencies; virtual gaming companies are introducing virtual rewards that can be sold for real money or saved in cryptocurrency wallets.
But if the metaverse is going to be as transformative as the internet and mobile wireless networks that came before it—and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be—businesses need to seriously ask themselves belize whatsapp data how they’re going to get there. The metaverse is the technology of tomorrow, and we can’t achieve it using the IT infrastructure of the past. Until businesses break free from their traditional approach to IT and replace it with a modernized, distributed digital infrastructure, they won’t be able to realize the true promise of the metaverse.
Intel’s Raja Koduri has argued that scaling persistent, immersive, real-time computing globally to support the metaverse will require 1,000 times greater computational efficiency than the current state of the art can deliver, and it’s hard to disagree with his assessment. Realistically rendering avatars in a virtual world and enabling users to interact with objects and other avatars in that virtual world—all in real time—will require capturing, transmitting, analyzing, and representing truly mind-boggling amounts of data with extremely low latency. We’ve seen companies achieve this for demos and a small number of early adopters, but there’s still a lot more to do before the metaverse can go mainstream.
The metaverse is the future, but that future depends on digital infrastructure
Metaverse “true believers” seem to assume that the necessary infrastructure upgrades will simply occur as a natural result of technological progress. I question this line of thinking: companies certainly have the opportunity to deploy metaverse-ready digital infrastructure, but they need to be proactive in making it happen.
Volume 5 of the Global Interconnection Index (GXI) includes data on how organizations around the world are increasing the bandwidth of their interconnections as they work to address their most pressing challenges. The data can help us understand how an optimized digital infrastructure—one that brings together and interconnects physical and virtual compute, storage, and networking resources, along with advanced applications and cloud services—can be an unparalleled source of competitive advantage.
Additionally, the GXI shows how digital leaders are emphasizing all three components of digital infrastructure: the digital core, the ecosystem, and the edge. Each component of digital infrastructure has a role to play in enabling the metaverse.
The Digital Core: Breaking Down the Barriers
Traditional IT architectures were based on siloed, centralized data centers; all transactions flowed through these data centers, regardless of where they originated. Today’s digital core is different: only certain critical workloads need to be deployed in the core, but even these on-premises systems can be cloud-adjacent, allowing them to quickly and easily tap into transformative cloud services. Additionally, digital core environments enable OPEX models, which can help companies balance their metaverse dreams against their financial realities.
The digital ecosystem: coming together to overcome challenges
Building the metaverse is too big a challenge for any one company to undertake alone. Providing the skills and capabilities that the metaverse needs will require an ecosystem of partners working together. This ecosystem will include cloud service providers that help rapidly scale computing and enable fast and reliable data migration, network service providers that help remove bottlenecks and virtualize key functions, and vendor-neutral interconnection partners that bring this effort together.