Jabez Tan, Research Director, Data Centre Market Intelligence at Structure Research will discuss the future and trends of global data centre colocation at Data Centre World Asia, Singapore 2017. John Bensalhia reports.

What does the future have in store for global data centre colocation?

Providing answers at Data Centre World Asia, Singapore 2017 is Jabez Tan, Research Director, Data Centre Market Intelligence at Structure Research. Jabez will give a detailed insight into the market size and growth trends driving this sector. He will consider questions such as the size of the global colocation market in 2017, and the amount of revenue likely to be generated by data centre colocation providers in 2020. As well as this, Jabez will assess the trends driving both global and regional data centre demand for colocation providers.

?Structure Research conducted an extensive and detailed bottom-up study of the global colocation competitive landscape and includes over 4,000 providers across the world,? says Jabez. ?The session will help address the current state of the data centre colocation landscape and more importantly, where is it headed over the next three to five years.?

Ahead of Jabez's presentation, here is a glimpse of the state of play with respect to the future of global data centre location. Overall, there are 621 colocation providers which can be broken down into two categories: wholesale (of which there are 135) and retail (of which there are 485). The market revenue from global colocation in 2016 was $33.6B, while this figure is predicted to nearly double to $60.8B by 2020. From a geographical angle, the largest market is to be found in the US. However, the fastest growing region is Asia Pacific. In fact, in terms of cloud node patterns, the Asia Pacific region is expected to surpass North America in market share by the year 2020. Figures from 2016 saw North America ahead a little of Asia Pacific ($13,996M against $11,779M) but the pattern is predicted to turn in three years (with the Asia Pacific figures of $23,818M ahead a little of North America's at $23,172M).

Breaking down the geography for wholesale and retail colocation, Jabez says that the USA and East Asia were the top regions for both of these categories in 2016. The USA scored 48% in the wholesale sector and 37% in retail while the East Asia figure for both of these was 16%. The third place went to a different region, however. The UK was the third most popular location for wholesale at 11% but for retail, this was a broader spectrum as the rest of Europe claimed 14%.

Moving to the public cloud, Jabez says that ?Massive-Scale public clouds continue to be the primary driver of wholesale colocation leasing and activity.?

Total Massive-Scale cloud revenue is set to grow considerably from the 2016 figure of $18.8B to $121.6B by 2020. In 2015, there was a front-running company in the Massive-Scale public cloud market, although as Jabez explains, others have also made their mark. ?The Massive-Scale Public Cloud market is still largely dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a  $7880 ? 70.7% share. However, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Alibaba continue to close the gap.?

For more information about the trends and future of global data centre colocation, come and see Jabez's talk at Data Centre World, Singapore in October!