Equinix is moving ahead of Digital Realty and NTT in the colocation market helped by two acquisitions in the most recent quarter, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research.

The company completed its acquisition of Australian data centre provider Metronode last month – having been first announced in December – alongside announcing the acquisition of the Infomart building in Dallas for $800 million.

According to the Synergy figures, Equinix and Digital Realty are growing far quicker than the overall market, with Equinix having 13% of total share – all in retail colocation – and Digital Realty at just over 8%. Digital Realty continues to dominate the wholesale colo market at 28%, while Equinix had a 17% share of retail colocation.

Of the smaller players, NTT is clear in third place with just over 6% of the overall colocation market, with KDDI/Telehouse and China Telecom rounding off the top five.

While a lot of importance continues to be placed in the North America and EMEA heartlands – in January Digital Realty announced a deal with Oracle to add direct access for its US cloud infrastructure – Synergy argues looking globally is key to future operations. Equinix ranked as a leader in EMEA and Latin America, ranked second in North America, and third in APAC.

“When it comes to operating data centres and colocation services, scale and geographic reach are important. Enterprises are pushing more of their data centre operations into colocation facilities and are also aggressively driving more workloads onto the public cloud, where cloud providers themselves use a lot of colocation facilities,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Satisfying the needs of those enterprises and cloud providers often requires a large and widely distributed data centre footprint.

“In order to help achieve that scale there needs to be constant investment in existing data centres… in addition to which we’ve seen $42 billion in data centre M&A deals over the last 36 months, with Equinix or Digital Realty alone accounting for half of the total,” added Dinsdale. “There are good reasons why those two are the leading players in the colocation market.”

According to figures published by the analyst firm in January, 2017 was a record-breaking year for data centre M&A activity, with 48 transactions at $20 billion overall.