Digital Realty retains EMEA colocation market leader status in H1 2021

Digital Realty continues to lead the colocation market across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), while its arch rival Equinix snaps at its heels in second place, according to Cloudscene’s half-yearly ranking of the world’s datacentre operators.

Australia-based Cloudscene has published the latest version of its half-yearly leaderboard, covering the first six months of 2021, which ranks datacentre operators across North America, EMEA, Asia, Oceania and Latin America by various metrics.

Contributing factors that determine an operator’s rankings include the number of datacentres they have, how many cloud on-ramps they offer, the partnerships they have with other service providers and the state of their networking setups.

The company offers a comparison site-like service that allows prospective datacentre and colocation capacity purchasers in various regions of the world to pit operators against each other to see which one best suits their IT requirements.

The leaderboard data for EMEA confirms that colocation giant Digital Realty remains the region’s market leader, based on Cloudscene’s ranking metrics, closely followed by Equinix in second place, but it appears there is relatively little separating the two.

“While Digital Realty remains in the top spot as the market leader for total datacentre footprint, service provider ecosystem and network fabric presence, Equinix is the market leader for total cloud on-ramps and ranks competitively for all other categories,” said Cloudscene in a statement. “This has created a marginal gap in the rankings for the half-year.”

The rankings of the providers across North America have remained static over the last six months, with Equinix the market leader for that region and Digital Realty in second place. Equinix also leads the market in Latin America and Oceania.

“Industry leaders have continued to expand their footprint to support the ever-increasing demand for datacentre, network and cloud services, which has come about as a result of the global challenges across 2020 and 2021,” said Cloudscene CEO Belle Lajoie.

Out of all the regions covered by the leaderboard, Cloudscene’s data suggests it is the performance of Asia’s datacentre market that is particularly impressive this time around.

“The results of the H1 2021 leaderboard show that Asia, in particular, is experiencing exponential growth, which has created some significant movement within the rankings for this region,” said Lajoie.

For example, while Equinix retained its market-leading position in Asia during the first half of 2021, China Telecom entered the top 10 for the first time, securing third place. There was no change for NTT Communications, meanwhile, which retained second place, while Digital Realty climbed three places to number seven in the leaderboard this time.

Overall, Cloudscene’s data shows that over the past six months, a total of 408 datacentres have come online.