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Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT lead datacentre colocation market
NTT had the biggest market share in Asia-Pacific, while Equinix ranked third in the region during the first quarter of 2018, according to market research data
Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT maintained their lead in global colocation market during the first quarter this year, helped in part by the acquisitions that they have made.
The three datacentre kingpins now account for almost 28% of the worldwide market and all have grown their market share over the past four quarters, according to new data released by Synergy Research Group.
Equinix was the leader of the pack, with a 13% share of the market during the first quarter. It has subsequently completed two more acquisitions – Infomart Dallas and Australia’s Metronode – which are expected to bolster its market position.
The closest competitors to the big three were KDDI/Telehouse and China Telecom, both of which have a 3% market share, followed by a group of operators that each has a 2% share – CyrusOne, Interxion, Cyxtera, Global Switch and Coresite.
Synergy Research’s data, covering both wholesale and retail colocation, also showed that the market continues to expand steadily across all regions, with Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Latin America having the highest growth rates.
When measured in local currencies, the major markets with the highest growth rates were all in the APAC region – China, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan and Singapore. NTT had the biggest market share in APAC, while Equinix ranked third in the region.
“When it comes to operating datacentres and colocation services, scale and geographic reach are important,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.
“Enterprises are pushing more of their datacentre operations into colocation facilities and are also aggressively driving more workloads onto the public cloud, where cloud providers themselves use a lot of colocation facilities,” Dinsdale added.
Dinsdale noted that satisfying the needs of enterprises and cloud providers often requires a large and widely distributed datacentre footprint. To help achieve that scale, there needs to be constant investment in existing datacentres, he said.
With Equinix or Digital Realty accounting for half of the $42bn in datacentre mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals over the past three years, Dinsdale said: “There are good reasons why those two are the leading players in the colocation market.”
Read more about datacentres in APAC
- DBS Bank is working with Equinix to transform one of its traditional datacentres in Singapore into a cloud-optimised one that will reduce its datacentre footprint and operating costs.
- Singapore sits at the top of the APAC datacentre market in terms of capacity, with a current total supply of 370 MW of IT power supply among co-location operators, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
- Colt is planning to launch its own datacentre facilities in India and Singapore in a bid to expand its growing footprint across the APAC region.
- A blended strategy of building and acquiring datacentres, as well as forming local partnerships, has contributed to the rapid rise of one of the fastest-growing datacentre providers in Asia.
In expanding its footprint in the APAC region, Equinix recently announced that the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) will be accessible in its datacentres in Singapore and across six metros in Australia, including the Cable Landing Station (CLS) in Perth and points of presence in Sydney and Melbourne.
The ASC is the first 40Tbps subsea cable system between Asia and Australia, which will provide businesses with the capacity to handle growth in data consumption, with lower latency and cost, between the two locations.
Earlier in January 2018, Digital Realty added new connectivity services, such as high bandwidth gigabit Ethernet connections, to its Singapore datacentres located in Loyang and Jurong. The services are part of its efforts to meet the growing demand for high-speed data connectivity from organisations in the city-state.
