In aggregate those 24 hyperscale operators now have almost 320 large data centers in their networks, with many of them having substantial infrastructure in multiple countries. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. Each has 45 or more data center locations with at least two in each of the four regions (North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America). The scale of infrastructure investment required to be a leading player in cloud services or cloud-enabled services means that few companies are able to keep pace with the hyperscale operators, and they continue to both increase their share of service markets and account for an ever-larger portion of spend on data center infrastructure equipment – servers, storage, networking, network security and associated software.
“Hyperscale operators are now dominating the IT landscape in so many different ways,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “They are reshaping the services market, radically changing IT spending patterns within enterprises, and causing major disruptions among infrastructure technology vendors. Our latest forecasts show these factors being accentuated over the next five years.”
