Datacenters: an ultra-dominated US market
Autor: Mystérieux | Publicado: 2017-04-23T07:47:00-07:00


According to Cloudscene's quarterly study released this week, the global data center market is largely dominated by North American players. This is unfortunately also true in Europe, where the local players are absent from the Top 5 continental.








Cloudscene released this week its quarterly study on the universe of data centers, Internet points of presence and cloud service providers. The least that can be said is that the dominance of the USA on this world market is undivided.



In North America, two players stand out: the Californians Equinix, which operates 153 datacenters, and Digital Realty which owns 174. They are followed by CoreSite, based in Denver, Colorado, Zayo based in Boulder also in Colorado , And Century Link headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana.



More surprising and a little worrying, the European market is also dominated by actors from across the Atlantic: when one observes the Top 10 data center operators in Europe, one finds this domination of the North Americans with in the " Equinix, Interxion, Telehouse, Digital Realty, Global Switch and Level 3 Communications. The first European actor is Nikhef, only 7th: it is an atomic research center based in the Netherlands, which operates for the needs of its scientific activities a data center in Amsterdam. The 8th and first commercial operator of European origin is English Colt, and only one French infrastructure operator appears in the top ten Europeans: it is Orange, which is ninth with its subsidiary Orange Business Services. The Top 10 is completed by a Romanian actor, NXData.



The main traffic exchange point in Europe is the Dutch NL-ix, whose 142 members serve a hundred data centers in more than a dozen countries and which alone accounts for nearly 2 Tb / s of Internet traffic.




Globally, 41.6% of North America, 40.4% in Europe, 9.5% in Asia and 8.5% in Oceania (1), have access to more than 14,000 Internet points of service managed by data-processing operators analyzed by Cloudscene.



The facts are there. We in Europe are extremely dependent on technical infrastructures managed by private companies whose decision-making centers are located in the USA. The election of Donald Trump has led to more uncertainty, particularly as to the political decisions that could be made: the new US administration could completely abandon the preservation of the neutrality of the Net and make decisions towards more protectionism. Given all this, would it not be appropriate to launch a major European Internet infrastructure policy that would favor the development of international players with their headquarters in Europe?



(1) In this note I have summarized under the term "Europe" what Cloudscene means by the acronym EMEA, namely Europe, Middle East and Africa, because it is according to this geographical division which is The world's leading IT providers. However, it is Europe that makes up the bulk of the EMEA area in terms of data centers, as Africa still has very little capacity.

As for the absence of South America, I asked Cloudscene who said that I have the greatest difficulty in obtaining data on this region, whose actors are not yet very transparent. Cloudscene hopes to be able to integrate South America into its studies in the near future, we will have a clearer idea of ​​who are the players in the data center market in Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.