Strategic partnerships between data centre providers will become more commonplace as companies look to expand services, according to the findings of a report from IDC Australia.
The report, Demystifying the ANZ Datacentre Provider Market, found that there are many ways in which companies can maintain competitive differences including technology investments, mergers, acquisitions and partnerships.
For example, hosting provider Rackspace recently began offering cloud services from Digital Realty’s Sydney data centre while iseek Communications partnered with Equinix in Sydney for customers who require dual site redundancy.
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IDC Australia and New Zealand's infrastructure research manager, Glen Duncan, said the market in A/NZ is complex with more than 70 providers offering competing services including co-location, managed infrastructure in a third party data centre and public cloud infrastructure.
“With the increasing scale and reach of multinational corporations, smaller data centre providers will need to find alternative avenues for differentiation,” he said in a statement.
According to Duncan, an opportunity exists in energy efficiency as more customers demand data centres with a 1.2 to 1.3 Power Utilisation Efficiency (PUE) rating.
In order to bring down the PUE rating on older data centres, he suggested that providers should invest in newer green technology.
“Other data centre providers are investing in The Uptime Institute accreditation to have a certified guarantee for redundancy for those customers that mandate it,” said Duncan.
“Collaborations between businesses in adjacent areas can be a strategy that enables an organisation to develop its capabilities and broaden its portfolio of integrated services.”
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