Boom time for outsourced datacentre space

40 per cent of overall European datacentre market to be outsourced to third parties by 2019, report claims

Some 40 per cent of the European datacentre market will be outsourced to third parties by 2019, according to consulting firm BroadGroup.

BroadGroup's Data Centre Europe 6 report provides forecasts for co-location, hosting and cloud covering 18 countries in Europe.

Outsourcing to third-party datacentres will be sustained and reach 40 per cent of the overall market within four years, the report concluded.

"We engage with many investors, and they typically still like the sector," said Steve Wallage, managing director of BroadGroup Consulting. "The co-location market retains good growth of 9-12 per cent per year and impressive margins while hosting and IaaS, covered extensively in this report for the first time, will enjoy higher growth rates with IaaS at 35-40 per cent."

User procurement is evolving from a mix of property, facilities management and specific datacentre input, to one focused more on total cost of ownership, wider IT and cloud issues and power efficiency, BroadGroup said. These concerns open opportunities for location agnostic facilities and for competitive low-cost power locations, it added.

The European market for third-party datacentres represents 27 per cent of the global total, BroadGroup said. On the back of its proposed £2.35bn acquisition of TelecityGroup, Equinix will lead the market in terms of space with a total share of nine per cent, the report found.