News
BroadGroup: Data Centres Europe IV
June 2012 by BroadGroup
In this new update of the 2010 report, data centre markets across 17 Western European countries, key suppliers and industry issues have been analysed. The report believes that Europe is now in its third stage of evolution with data centres targeting vertical segments such as cloud, media, and other financials presenting a more challenging marketing proposition.
This comes at a time when cloud services represent a bigger share of revenues, supply constraints begin to take root, energy availability assumes increasing concern and data centre service and space prices begin to rise.
Huge focus has been sustained on the “Big 4” markets of London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris which in the first quarter of 2012, represented around 85% of data centre Capex. The trend appears set to continue, with the report projecting outsourcing growth across the next 3 years, falling only slightly short of the US level of 30%.
New locations are aggressively marketing their competitive advantage and the report cites Norway, Ireland, Switzerland and other locations with renewable energy resources who are seeking to attract data centres. Power supply remains a concern across all markets in the report. In the UK for example, reliance on gas imports could lead to brown-outs by as early as 2013.
In contrast to 2010, cloud now represents more significant opportunities. Although Data centre players are re-positioning themselves in the cloud value chain, BroadGroup sees some dangers in shifting to become a full cloud service offering.
Cloud enables customers to locate data centres in a range of other countries. Location barriers are even easing in financial services with many banking applications able to be housed up to 2,000km away and improvements in bandwidth increasing that distance all the time.
The report analyses in detail the profiles of 10 pan-European players and individually with detailed metrics, 17 markets. Regional expertise is a competitive differentiator, and as obsolescence will threaten poor quality facilities who fail to improve their PUE rates, pan-Europeans have the opportunity to advance their vertical market expertise and leverage cost, technical and managed services differentiation.
The report forecasts that the importance of the “Big 4” markets will increase over the next three years before ending in 2016 at virtually the same share of 3rd party data centre space. This reflects the continuing focus on the major markets, and the current investment plans of the major players. Significant growth will occur in the wholesale data centre segment and carrier neutral facilities across the next 3 years.
Existing players will be focused more on maximizing returns from existing assets. BroadGroup also remains cautious on real availability. Outside of the main players, funding will remain difficult for unproven and speculative schemes, particularly those dependent on an anchor tenant. Space will be less important than power as a metric.
While procurement requirements become smaller, shorter and more integrated with other IT (and cloud) sourcing requirements, BroadGroup predicts for the first time, that strong pressure exists to increase pricing of data centres from 2013 onwards.
Overall the report is invaluable for companies engaged in the data centre sector and will provide forecast data to 2016 for 17 West European countries, broken down by segment, key current and expected future build. It also provides a unique comparison and rating of key data centre suppliers across a range of criteria.
Data Centres Europe IV
Published: June 2012
Pages: 162pp
Figures: 34
Single User Licence: GBP 2495.00
Corporate User Licence: GBP 2695.00
