Schneider Electric Partners with BroadGroup to Launch first International Colocation Club

Hosted by Paul-François Cattier, President Cloud & Service Providers and Finance, the first International Colocation Club took place last week in Paris and gathered 8 countries represented from as far as Brazil and Russia. The objectives were to share and exchange ideas around market challenges and business experience in the colocation industry and allow Colocation players to meet with their international peers.

The initiative was launched in France three years ago and with more than 30 companies as members, the Colo Circle – known as Cercle ColoC – has been a success over the years. Meeting twice a year at Schneider Electric, the leadership of colocation companies in France discussed the current business environment, and their perspective of the year ahead. While there were macro-economic trends undermining France’s economy at present, colocation remained a strong business with acquisitions still in play and further expansion planned both within Paris, and across a number of business cities in the country.

International consulting firm BroadGroup presented a detailed perspective of the colocation market landscape, current trends and drivers, and future growth. The company has focused on data center, hosting and cloud markets for the past nine years, carries out strategic consulting with key players, extensive work with investors including full commercial due diligence and has recently undertaken significant projects in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, Brazil, Singapore, Malaysia, and South Africa. Its research includes Colocation Markets Quarterly covering the four Tier 1 markets in Europe, and it also hosts a number of major events around world including the Finance and Investment Forum for Data Center Hosting Cloud (London, January 22, 2015) and the Datacloud global congress (Monaco, June 3-4, 2015).

BroadGroup expects that the number of global Internet users and Internet-enabled devices - key drivers for data growth - will grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17 per cent and 27 per cent in 2013 and 2018, respectively. Video streaming is another important new driver. Netflix for example now accounts for 35% of all Internet traffic in the US with an average home using 20.4 Gb of content per month.

CIO perceptions are changing too. BroadGroup reported that several years ago data centers were often regarded as a pain point because of data growth, lack/cost power, old estates, and previous lack of focus. However data centers have returned as a top priority and seen as the key to IT architecture, Cloud plans and the move to outsourced offerings. 24% of UK data centre space as a proportion of total space is now outsourced.

BroadGroup believes that Data centers in mature markets are part of a broader IT/Internet infrastructure and attractive to many market sectors and users. This means that focus has shifted to the business benefits rather than the technical features of colocation and a strong proposition and positioning around cloud.
Cloud changes the notion of thinking in terms of compute (plus potentially network and storage) resource rather than data center usage and leads on to Pay-per-use, linking data center costs to business and application costs, virtualized/on-demand resources and agile and dynamic provisioning.

“Cloud means that procurement is no longer the reserve of data center specialists, even property people or led by specific applications, but by a broader IT infrastructure and cloud strategy,” commented Steve Wallage, Managing Director, BroadGroup Consulting.

Presenting different strategic alternatives for colocation and cloud, BroadGroup believes that flexibility in the data center world, used to mean offering different Tiers within the same facility.

“We are now seeing highly flexible or monthly deals and a move towards more dynamic on-demand offerings,” said Wallage.

The evolution of more flexible business focused offerings will lead to significant growth trends in the colocation market with 16% CAGR in Asia up to 2018.

Representatives of colocation providers from Brazil, France, India, Mexico, Russian Federation, Singapore, Italy and the UK subsequently discussed a number of key topics impacting Colocation.

Contact Information

P Low

MD

BroadGroup

(44) 2071995730

enquiries@broad-group.com