OREANDA-NEWS. February 18, 2016. Technology trends, particularly the cloud, are re-shaping the colocation market, and Gartner is urging IT planners to better understand what’s going on and where things are headed.

Gartner takes a close look at what’s happening in its report, “Eight Trends That Will Shape the Colocation Market in 2016.” It finds the increasing importance of colocation at the center of it all.

“As colocation’s role as a strategic element in everything from hybrid cloud, digital business and data center consolidation increases, market players, technologies and substantial investment will all combine to createamarketinflux,” Gartner says.

The trends Gartner highlights in its report range from big data, to Internet of Things, to edge computing. Its analysis of several of them was particularly insightful and timely, and we discuss them below.

Trend: The Edge-Computing Model and the IoT (External Focus) Are Growing

An organization’s ability to extend IT to the edge of its corporate network has become critical because that’s increasingly where it finds its data, partners and end users. A traditional approach to IT, i.e. keeping it siloed and centralized, can’t deliver the kind of connectivity that dispersed and mobile end users on content-rich applications now expect. A company’s IT needs to be agile and stay close to its users or data sources in order to deliver that kind of interconnection. Meanwhile, the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) makes an edge computing strategy more essential – if companies hope to exploit this new flood of data streaming from a multitude of sensors. As Gartner says, “It’s likely that consolidation of traffic, local processing and data thinning will be required. Ideally, this will take place closer to concentrations of such devices — once again at the edge.”

Trend: The Role of DCIM Is Growing Among Colocation Providers

Gartner notes that DCIM within a colocation provider plays both internal and external roles. This observation is spot-on and particularly relevant to us at Equinix — we recently wrote a blog post about the advances being made to our data center information management. As a growing colocation and interconnection company supporting 145 data centers and 7,000-plus customers, maintaining a sturdy DCIM platform that benefits ourselves and our customers has taken on increased importance. A comprehensive DCIM architecture helps us meet our growing customer base’s constant need for accurate measurement of energy and consumption, as well as power and cooling optimization. It can also help our customers improve operational efficiency and transparency.

Trend: Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures Are Proliferating in the Colocation Market

Gartner notes several mergers and acquisitions in 2015, including Equinix’s announced (and since completed) acquisition of European data center provider Telecity. Gartner added: “We expect this accretive effort to continue, as capital-strong players look to expand their portfolios in terms of geographic footprint and services offered, particularly in the realm of colocation/cloud hybrid deployments.”

The subject of future expansion for Equinix came up in an interview with Eric Schwartz, president of Equinix Europe, after the Telecity deal. His response: “The size of our balance sheet and our ability to access capital means we’re positioned to expand in these new markets and the new locations we’ve acquired with Telecity, where there’s demand and where customers indicate they have requirements.”

Schwartz also addressed the question of additional acquisitions: “The priority at the moment is to make sure we integrate Telecity and Bit-isle (the Japanese data center company acquired last year) in a way that’s effective for customers and for us.”