There is No Cloud: It's Just Someone Else's Computer

A new study shows the opportunity available to partners for data center colocation sales is booming – at an annual growth rate of 14 percent per year!! Research firm, MarketsandMarkets, predicts the colocation market will go from $32 billion this year to $62 billion in 2022. Major drivers in the data center market surround cloud computing and Big Data. 

The IT environment has always been Hybrid. There were always applications run by someone else (like email; today, classified as SaaS). Many companies ran their own file server for various reasons including local file storage or a business specific application. Additionally, companies had hosted servers sitting in data centers or in their own NOC too. That is a hybrid environment.

It still is, but now the IT strategy involves virtualized applications, SaaS, Office365 and public and private clouds. All those clouds have to sit somewhere. The servers that keep AWS, Azure, Google Compute, Salesforce, your Apple iTunes, Netflix and Facebook humming, sit in data centers around the globe.

Today, companies are collecting information like never before. (They are also creating content for marketing at a significant rate as well.) All this data has to be housed somewhere. That somewhere is a data center usually. Even if it is sitting on AWS or S3 (like top secret data from Booz Allen), that data is sitting in a data center. Cloud backup companies utilize the computing infrastructure of of Amazon and Google to act as their external hard drives for data storage.

Atlanta, Dallas, Silicon Valley and Virginia have seen a surge in new data center construction underway. This is to meet the demand of the current tenants – cloud providers and enterprises – but also to be available for the next set of tenants coming along. Those include edge computing, AI and IoT providers and mid-sized businesses looking for reliable, secure and cost-effective IT infrastructure.

The data center sector includes wholesale and retail colocation. There are a number of vendors in the space that analysts watch including COLOTRAQ Elite Vendors such as Equinix, QTS, Digital Realty Trust, CyrusOne, NTT Communications DSM, DataPipe, Cologix, Telstra, Interxion, Fortrust, Wowrack and ByteGrid just to name a few as we have over 400 direct agreements with practically every colocation, managed hosting and enterprise cloud provider worldwide.

There has been a tremendous amount of mergers and acquisitions in this space. At COLOTRAQ, the largest broker/master agency for Data Center services (Colocation, Managed Hosting, Cloud & Connectivity), we keep our eye on what is happening in order to best serve our channel partners and their customers.