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The top three players in the colocation space – Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT – have grown three times as fast as the overall market over the last four quarters, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The research firm, which cast its eye over the overall cloud market earlier this month, found that while the total colocation market grew 9% from the previous year, the three leaders in aggregate grew colocation revenues by 28%.

Synergy adds that the colocation market is growing ‘steadily’ across all regions, with APAC being the fastest growing region and China, Hong Kong, and India being the major countries with the highest growth rates.

The figures also take into account the recent consolidation moves in the market. Equinix, the market leader, announced it was to buy 29 data centre buildings from Verizon for $3.6 billion, as well as acquiring the Paris operations of second-placed Digital Reality for $211m in August.

To put the three major players’ lead into perspective, CenturyLink, who announced plans to acquire Level 3 Communications in November, remains in the ‘best of the rest’ category, alongside China Telecom, CyrusOne, DuPont Fabros, Global Switch, KDDI, and Verizon.

Their market share combined rests at just over 15%, while the three leaders have more than a fifth of overall share. Despite being in third place overall, NTT was the fastest grower year on year at a rate of 36%, ahead of Equinix (26%) and Digital Realty (25%).

Synergy argues this is a long-running trend for the industry. “In some senses colocation is following the same path as the cloud with market power gradually being concentrated in the hands of a few focused and deep-pocketed operators,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy in a statement. “In both cases the ability to run large data centre operations effectively and efficiently is vital to success and companies that are too diversified or unfocused will struggle.”

Dinsdale added that colocation growth opportunities will be ‘pulled along in the slipstream’ as cloud usage continues to rise; a point this publication made last year, arguing that “paradoxically, colocation is rising in popularity precisely because enterprises want cloud.”

(c)iStock.com/roberthyrons

The top three players in the colocation space – Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT – have grown three times as fast as the overall market over the last four quarters, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The research firm, which cast its eye over the overall cloud market earlier this month, found that while the total colocation market grew 9% from the previous year, the three leaders in aggregate grew colocation revenues by 28%.

Synergy adds that the colocation market is growing ‘steadily’ across all regions, with APAC being the fastest growing region and China, Hong Kong, and India being the major countries with the highest growth rates.

The figures also take into account the recent consolidation moves in the market. Equinix, the market leader, announced it was to buy 29 data centre buildings from Verizon for $3.6 billion, as well as acquiring the Paris operations of second-placed Digital Reality for $211m in August.

To put the three major players’ lead into perspective, CenturyLink, who announced plans to acquire Level 3 Communications in November, remains in the ‘best of the rest’ category, alongside China Telecom, CyrusOne, DuPont Fabros, Global Switch, KDDI, and Verizon.

Their market share combined rests at just over 15%, while the three leaders have more than a fifth of overall share. Despite being in third place overall, NTT was the fastest grower year on year at a rate of 36%, ahead of Equinix (26%) and Digital Realty (25%).

Synergy argues this is a long-running trend for the industry. “In some senses colocation is following the same path as the cloud with market power gradually being concentrated in the hands of a few focused and deep-pocketed operators,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy in a statement. “In both cases the ability to run large data centre operations effectively and efficiently is vital to success and companies that are too diversified or unfocused will struggle.”

Dinsdale added that colocation growth opportunities will be ‘pulled along in the slipstream’ as cloud usage continues to rise; a point this publication made last year, arguing that “paradoxically, colocation is rising in popularity precisely because enterprises want cloud.”

Brand owners are caught in a digital crossfire. From one direction comes intense competitive pressure to innovate or to at least follow very, very quickly. From the precisely opposite direction comes the potentially existential threat of an app very publicly flopping or – even worse – being very publicly revealed to jeopardize the customer’s well-being. Either way, you lose brand value in a social marketplace where brand is your primary currency.
What’s a brand owner to do?

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As the race for the presidency heats up, IT leaders would do well to recall the famous catchphrase from Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign against George H. W. Bush: “It’s the economy, stupid.” That catchphrase is important, because IT economics are important. Especially when it comes to cloud. Application performance management (APM) for the cloud may turn out to be as much about those economics as it is about customer experience.

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Companies are always looking for new ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs while maintaining excellence in the quality of their products and services. A big part of cloud computing that IT departments and service providers increasingly look to is APIs (application programming interfaces) to enable automation, in turn driving efficiency, consistency and cost savings. How are businesses doing this, and where are the opportunities for future development?

Enabling operational efficiency

One important outcome of the automation enabled by APIs is consistency. Through automation, businesses remove human error (and human expense) from operational processes. Even when a repeatable task is well-documented with a clear procedure, when human workers perform the task it is likely that you will end up with varied outcomes. On the other hand, if that repeatable task is automated, it will be performed in the same way every time, improving operational reliability and in turn operational efficiency. API enabled platforms are driving a true re-think in how we manage IT; we are moving quickly from a process-driven, reactive world to an automation-driven, proactive world.

Enabling DevOps automation

APIs allow for more dynamic systems that can scale up and down to deliver just the right amount of infrastructure to the application at all times. For example, instrumentation in your application that provides visibility to an orchestration layer can tell when more capacity is required in the web or app tier. The orchestration layer can then come back to the APIs provided by the infrastructure and begin spinning up new web servers and adding them to the load balancer pool to increase capacity. Likewise, systems built on APIs will then have the instrumentation to tell when they are overbuilt, for example at night and can then use the APIs to wind down unnecessary servers in order to reduce costs.

Indeed, through the ability to script the powering-on of development and testing environments at the start of the business day and automatically powering-off at the end of the business day, businesses can realize huge cost-savings on their hosting up to 50-60 per cent in some cases.

Overall, leveraging APIs in support of a DevOps strategy is always a blend of optimizing for cost, for performance and the ability to have deep app-level visibility.

Using APIs to automate reporting

APIs are also highly useful in reporting procedures, as many applications are now producing vast amounts of data that are often an untapped asset. IT teams therefore need to think about how to make those datasets available efficiently in order to build a dynamic reporting engine that can potentially be configured by the end user, who will be the person that understands the nature of the information that he or she needs to extract from the data.

This is frequently accomplished through APIs. IT teams and application services providers can use APIs to build systems that process the data and make it accessible to end users immediately, so that they do not have to go through a reporting team and do not lose any of the real-time value of their data.

API use in enabling business continuity and disaster recovery

The benefits of automation through APIs make them a crucial part of modern disaster recovery approaches. The assumption that you’ll be able to access all of the tools that you would need during a disaster through the typical user interfaces is not always true. In the modern world of highly virtualized infrastructure, APIs are the enabler for the core building blocks of disaster recovery, in particular replication, which is driven from the APIs exposed by the virtualization platforms. The final act of orchestrating DR, failover, is also often highly API dependent, for these reasons.

In essence, disaster recovery is one specific use case of the way that APIs enable efficiency and operations automation. Humans make mistakes and processes become very difficult to maintain and update. Therefore a DR plan based on processes and humans executing processes is not an ideal option to ensure the safety of your business in the event of a disaster. Kicking off DR can be likened to “pressing the big red button”. However, if you can make it one button that kick starts a set of automated processes, this will be much more manageable and reliable than thirteen different buttons, each of which has a thirty-page policy and procedure document that must be executed during a disaster.

The future of APIs

Despite the clear benefits of API-enabled automation and technology, the broader IT industry has not yet fully realized the potential of this technology, particularly in industries that have been leveraging information technology for a long time. In these industries, we are seeing a critical mass of legacy applications, legacy approaches to managing infrastructure, and legacy staff skillsets.

It is likely that the younger generation coming into the IT industry will move towards more comprehensive API use and maximize the value of APIs because this generation has grown up with them and learned with them. As we see disruptors displace incumbent packaged software players and new entrants to the enterprise IT community, we are likely to see more realization of the benefits of API use – particularly when utilizing their cloud infrastructures fully. However, this will take time, and we may be one to two full education cycles away from producing and maturing enough entry level IT professionals that have the education and training required to fully make use of the opportunities offered by APIs, particularly cloud ones.

Working as part of cloud computing solutions, APIs are also reducing the cost of developing new ideas. Businesses that want to innovate no longer need to make large upfront investment in equipment to get an idea off the ground. They can quickly start their business on cloud infrastructure as a service platforms and use APIs to control and power systems down to reduce costs as needed. As the new product or service grows, organizations can quickly scale on the same cloud infrastructure. And for it to truly cut costs, APIs should be part and parcel of cloud solutions – not a pricey addition to it.

As more and more innovative startups develop in the tech space, and enterprises increasingly search for new solutions and ways of working, we are likely to see even more creative uses of APIs to drive automation, consistency and efficiency. It’s important that businesses work to stay ahead of the market and competitors by making full use of new API-enabled software and other technologies to fully realize the benefits and cost-savings that they offer. 

Slide2There has certainly been no lack of punditry and controversy in the US regarding the hacking of John Podesta’s email account (along with the DNC email hack), with some claiming they were responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election. I will leave the impact of these claims to those who write and talk about politics. I don’t discuss politics in a work setting, so will leave that aspect to them.

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In September 2014, Apple made encryption default with the introduction of the iPhone 6. Then, in February 2016, a Los Angeles judge issued an order to Apple to help break into the encrypted iPhone belonging to a terrorist involved in a mass shooting. Apple had used some of the strongest encryption technologies and practices to protect its users and their data. The encryption technology did not discriminate between lawful and unlawful users. While there were many sides to this issue, it surfaced many important debates on security, privacy, and civil rights.

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Almost half of respondents in a new study from Redgate Software say they have adopted a DevOps approach to their projects – with a further third planning to join them within the next two years.

The study, the firm’s latest State of Database DevOps survey, polled 1,000 companies globally with more than half employing at least 500 people. While 47% polled overall said they are already on the road with DevOps initiatives, this number rises to 59% among companies with more than 10,000 employees.

IT services and retail are the industries most likely to favour DevOps, alongside finance and healthcare, while government, education and non-profit are the laggards, according to the research. Only one in five respondents said they are applying practices such as continuous delivery to their databases and their applications.

The biggest problem businesses looking at initiating DevOps face, according to the study, is a lack of appropriate skills. For those with no intentions to move over right now, the major hurdles remain a lack of awareness of business benefits, as well as not enough budget to spend on new tooling.

Naturally, any move towards DevOps benefits different job roles in various ways. Redgate argues that developers are on board because they want to be freed to do more value-added work, while database admins are more driven by collaborating between development and operations teams, as well as the need to reduce application downtime.

For Redgate, the results are somewhat unsurprising. “We’ve been helping our customers to improve the way they make changes to their databases for over 17 years now,” said Kate Duggan, Redgate product marketing manager. “This survey has highlighted that our customers are facing increasing pressure to speed up the delivery of software, and include the databases in the same processes they use for their applications. It means we can ensure we’re in a good position to help them overcome the particular challenges the database brings.”

You can read the full report here (registration required).