Equinix and Digital Realty have extended their leads in the colocation market, according to the latest note from analyst firm Synergy Research.

The updated note comes after Equinix officially completed the acquisition of 29 data centres from Verizon, a move first announced in December last year, as well as Digital Realty and DuPont Fabros announcing their intention to merge.

Synergy argues the Equinix and Verizon combination accounts for 13% of the overall market – including both retail colocation and wholesale – with Digital Reality and DuPont Fabros hitting 9% share. The latter has wholesale colocation as its primary driver, with the former entirely retail-based.

NTT, the third placed player, has just over 6% of the market overall, while the next largest vendors, KDDI/Telehouse, China Telecom, and CenturyLink/Cyxtera, have just over NTT’s share between them.

APAC continues to be the fastest growing region, with the four quickest growing companies – China, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia – all in the region. NTT leads in APAC, with Equinix and Digital Realty top in Europe and North America respectively.

“The aggressive growth of hyperscale data centre operators and other cloud and hosting companies is helping to drive demand for data centre footprint across all regions, while many enterprise customers require their data centre operators to span multiple metros and countries,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research. “These fundamental market drivers mean that colocation is increasingly a market where scale and geographic scope determines success.

“Equinix and Digital Realty were already growing much more rapidly than the overall market, and these deals will help them to further distance themselves from the competition,” Dinsdale added.

The margins of cloud products like virtual machines are still in the 50% range. In essence, price drops are going to be a regular feature for the foreseeable future. This begets the question – are hosted solutions becoming irrelevant today?
Boston-based market research firm, 451 Research, has been publishing their ‘Cloud Price Index’ for a few years now. The quarterly study looks into the pricing of various offerings in the cloud market to understand the shifting dynamics in the public, private and hybrid cloud market. According to Dr. Owen Rogers from 451 Research, the approach here is similar to how inflation is calculated – the price of a distributed sample of products from the market are analyzed periodically to ascertain the rise or drop in the prices of the various cloud offerings.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that GrapeUp, the leading provider of rapid product development at the speed of business, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Grape Up is a software company, specialized in cloud native application development and professional services related to Cloud Foundry PaaS. With five expert teams that operate in various sectors of the market across the USA and Europe, we work with a variety of customers from emerging startups to Fortune 1000 companies.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Datanami has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Datanami is a communication channel dedicated to providing insight, analysis and up-to-the-minute information about emerging trends and solutions in Big Data. The publication sheds light on all cutting-edge technologies including networking, storage and applications, and their effect upon business, industry, government, and research.

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As soon as the internet became mainstream, the entire travel and hospitality industry quickly pivoted. No longer did people have to visit a travel agent to plan an extensive vacation.
Today, in order for companies in the travel industry to survive, it’s necessary to recognize these changes and utilize the right technology to engage and convert customers.

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CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based cloud service management provider, has announced a $46 million (£35.8m) series D funding round with the company all set to go public.

The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Meritech Capital Partners, and existing investors .406 Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners, taking overall funding to $86m across four rounds.

The company provides a platform that sits on top of other cloud tools, enabling organisations to better understand their cloud costs, whether it is by department, team, application, or business group, and allocate accordingly. Customers include Pinterest, Dow Jones and Imgur.

CloudHealth is clear in its position that the next step from here is towards IPO, although writing in a company blog post, CEO and co-founder Dan Phillips explains how the path to going public is ‘rarely a straight line’.

“Not only are we looking to be part of that elite club [of public Boston technology software companies], but we are also looking to capitalise on a unique set of market conditions and opportunities that have unfolded with the advent of cloud computing,” Phillips wrote.

“Not many companies have the opportunity to be the leader in a disruptive market with exponential growth and become the anchor company at the centre of the Boston software technology ecosystem for decades to come.”

Earlier this year, a report from Byron Deeter, of Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), affirmed that IPOs in the cloud space were drying up, although this was offset by M&A activity going through the roof. Only five companies – Apptio, Blackline, Coupa, Everbridge, and Twilio – went public last year, with this year seeing Cloudera, MuleSoft and Okta all take the plunge.  

Could 2018’s first name be provisionally pencilled in therefore? Phillips told CloudTech in a statement that there was ‘no definitive timetable’ at the moment but noted the IPO market ‘is showing some positive signs, so it’s something we’ll continue to watch’.

“At this point we’re focusing more on hitting our short-term goals – continuing to capitalise on the market opportunity we have ahead of us,” he said. “Right now, we’re focusing on scaling our business in every way – expanding our product line, our geographical footprint, our partner portfolio and our talent base. This latest round of funding gives us the ability to continue to execute on our plans.”

“Our strategy is to focus on the hyperscale providers – AWS, Azure, and Google. Over the last year we saw that a lot of developers need to learn how to do their job in the cloud and we see this DevOps movement that we are catering to with our content,” stated Alessandro Fasan, Head of Global Sales at Cloud Academy, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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The cloud ushered in a fundamental change in the way applications are deployed. Instead of worrying about how much dedicated hardware to order for your data center, you simply spin up as many servers as you need to do the job, then decommission them once the job is done. Yet, you still have to plan how many servers you will need at each stage of processing; you still have to remember to decommission them when done; and you pay for the entire virtual machine during the time you use it even though the server may be idle for most of that time.

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