Despite criticism of the colocation business model, retail colocation services are growing at ten percent a year, and double that in China, according to market research figures.
The US is by far the biggest country for retail colocation, with around 35 percent of the global market, and no other country has more than ten percent, according to quarterly figures from Synergy Research Group. The growth rates have been welcomed by the industry, since it has been widely suggested that web-scale data centers owned by cloud giants such as Amazon and Google will undermine the business prospects of colocation firms.
No go-slow for colo
Equinix is the market leader in three of the top ten countries, but Interxion features strongly because of its European footprint, Synergy says. European countries including the UK, Netherlands and Germany are all growing faster than the average.
Globally, it’s good business, with twenty countries each making at least $100 million a year in retail colo revenues. And meanwhile the market for wholesale colo services is only a quarter of the retail sector, but it is growing faster. a smaller fraction of retail space.
“Despite the strong trend in companies shifting IT workloads from their own data center infrastructure to cloud services, growth in colocation remains robust in most countries,” said Synergy Research Group’s John Dinsdale. “With over 60 percent of colocation spend coming from various types of service provider, the colocation market is reasonably well insulated against major shifts in IT strategy within the enterprise sector.”