MarkET abstract METrOpOliTaN hub SEriES: TOrONTO
CONTENTS 4 5 10 14 18 19 20 Context Market status: Key market statistics for the data center market Data center spending in Market development Market outlook About the DCD Census About the Author DCD Intelligence Market Abstracts provide a comprehensive perspective on a single data center market, giving readers a coherent view of capacity, costs and constraints, and the market drivers that will shape future data center development. Based on data from DatacenterDynamics census (launched in 2011, and now covering more than 30 countries), DCD Intelligence Market Abstracts deliver critical market insight in a concise, easy-to-consume format. This Market Abstract focuses on the data center market in the largest data center hub in Canada, and one of North America s 10 largest (and fastest-growing) data center site locations. Other planned DCD Intelligence Market Abstracts will focus on London; Dallas; Washington, DC; New York; San Francisco; and Singapore. 2 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Context is the largest city in Canada and one of the most attractive locations for businesses and businesspeople in the world: It has been rated one of the best places in the world to live by the widely cited Economist Intelligence Unit (of The Economist magazine), which rated it No. 4 on a list of the world s 10 most livable cities. The Greater Area (GTA), including the neighboring cities in what is known in the region as the Golden Horseshoe, has a population of more than 6 million, making it the fifth-most-populous metropolitan area in North America. In some media-market definitions, is considered to have a total drawing area of 35 million people the entire population of Canada. From a data center perspective, there is at least a grain of truth in this definition. Canadian businesspeople and (especially) public-sector managers are greatly influenced by the idea of data sovereignty the notion that Canadian data should remain in Canada and not be stored in the US, where it is subject to Patriot Act/NSA oversight and would prefer to rely on -based suppliers rather than US giants, such as Amazon Web Services. is Canada s business and finance hub: Many national institutions, including Canada s Big Five banks (the five largest financial institutions in the country) have their operational headquarters in, meaning that data centers located in the GTA are serving users from Newfoundland in the east to Vancouver in the west, 5.5 time zones away. From a data center perspective, is clearly the most important center in Canada. InsightaaS, a -based research firm, estimates that, in 2012, total spending on IT products and services by Canadian public- and private-sector organizations was about C$97 billion, with $40.7 billion (42%) allocated to purchases of hardware and software. Large enterprises accounted for one-third of this spending, roughly half of which was allocated to enterprise hardware and software products (with the balance allocated to client devices and related software and peripherals). The Ontario market, which is dominated by the GTA, is thought to account for 42% of all IT-product spending by large enterprises in Canada, meaning that in 2012, large enterprises in Ontario allocated approximately $2.8 billion to enterprise hardware and software. The statistics presented later in this report (Figure 6) show that GTA data center systems and storage account for $1.5 billion (54%) of this spending. 3 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Market status: Key market statistics for the data center market is Canada s largest data center hub and one of North America s 10 largest, with roughly the same amount of operating capacity as Washington, D.C./adjacent Virginia/ Maryland and Los Angeles. DCD estimates that as of 2014, the data center market was composed of 590,000 square meters of white space (raised floor plus associated support space). This represents an increase in capacity of nearly 25% over the 480,000 square meters captured by the DCD census in 2011. As Figure 1 illustrates, IT and facilities equipment in data centers are estimated to draw a total of 650,000 kilowatts (650MW) in 2014, up 30% since 2011. Recent market developments are consistent with this forecast: For example, in September, CenturyLink Technology Services opened a new $70 million data center (located within an existing shell that was previously an IBM Canada PC warehouse and configuration center) of more than 100,000 square feet, drawing 5MW of power. This facility alone accounts for roughly 25% of new space forecast for the year and virtually all of the forecast power increase. Figure 1: EU data center market share year to the end of June 2014 total: 37.2bn Parameter 2011 Population Estimate 2012 Population Estimate 2013 Population Estimate 2014 Population Estimate 2011-2014 CAGR/total growth White Space (square metres) 480,000 520,000 550,000 590,000 7.1%/22.9% Power requirement (KW) 500,000 550,000 600,000 650,000 9.1%/30.0% Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 4 www.dcd-intelligence.com
The accelerating growth in electricity use by data centers (relative to growth in white space) reflects the increasing rack density found in facilities. DCD census research from 2013 found that 17.5% of racks installed in had a density greater than 10kW/rack. This penetration is not as high as DCD has found in some of the global markets where space is extremely scarce and expensive over 20% of racks installed in New York and Hong Kong have densities of over 10 kw/rack but it is consistent with other highly concentrated urban centers, including London (16.7%), as is shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: EU data center market share year to the end of June 2014 total: 37.2bn 25 20 15 % 10 5 0 22.8% 20.8% 19.7% 19.1% 18% 17.5% 16.7% 16.5% 15% 13.7% 13.3% 12.8% 11.3% 8.8% New York Hong Kong Tokyo Chicago Sao Paulo London Frankfurt Singapore Shanghai Paris Mumbai Amsterdam Dubai Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 5 www.dcd-intelligence.com
is widely recognized as the center of the Canadian cloud and colo market, and this perception is reinforced by findings from the DCD census. IT services/colo is the largest data center sector (as measured in white space), accounting for nearly one-third of data center capacity. Finance is also a major market sector, accounting for 20% of all white space. The telecommunications/media sector accounts for 13% of all white space; as Figure 3 demonstrates, government, manufacturing and the services sector have also deployed a substantial amount (40,000-60,000 square meters) of data center capacity in. To put the data in Figure 3 in perspective, consider the prominence of Ontario in the Canadian enterprise landscape. According to data from Statistics Canada, in 2012 Ontario contained 50% or more of all Canadian establishments with 500 or more employees in the financial services, wholesale/retail and government sectors, and over 40% of enterprise-sized establishments in the business services and manufacturing sectors. Many of the government facilities are based in Ottawa (at the east end of Ontario, about a four-hour drive from ), and the manufacturing activities are spread throughout the province. But the balance of the government operations (including both Ontario provincial and municipal offices, as well as some federal offices), a majority of Canadian financial services and wholesale/retail operations, and a substantial proportion of operations in most other Canadian sectors are based in the GTA and need GTA-area data center support. It s interesting to note that, although these larger organizations operate legacy data centers, many leading Canadian sectors have been reluctant to embrace the cloud and other externally managed data center options. Financial-services firms have extensive private cloud pilots but have cited regulatory constraints as inhibitors to broader cloud adoption. The public sector, including the government, healthcare and education sectors, has been reluctant to use third-party services for fear of exposing sensitive data on Canadian citizens to facilities that are outside of their control. There are signs that this is changing, however. In October 2014, IBM Canada announced that it had been selected by Shared Services Canada, which acts as the central resource for federal government computing, to provide and manage enterprise data centre space as part of the Canadian government s data centre consolidation initiative. IBM claims to have invested over $200 million in data center expansion in Canada, including a substantial investment in a SoftLayer cloud data center in. Figure 3: data center asset base by sector, 2013 Other 9% Services 10% IT services & colo 32% Telecoms & Media 13% Server 61.6% Manufacturing & Industry 7% Government 9% Finance 9% Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 6 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Aging infrastructure signals a need for continued refresh and expansion Despite the rapid growth of s data center white space, and the new facilities and equipment that this growth entails, s infrastructure is relatively old. Figure 4, which contains DCD census data on the age of shells/buildings, facility equipment and IT and networking equipment across 14 major global data center hubs, shows that -based operations are housed in aging buildings and often employ older facilities equipment. At an average of 13.0 years, s data center buildings are older than those in use anywhere except New York, and the facility equipment used in data centers is also relatively old, at an average of 6.3 years even though almost 20% of white space has been deployed since 2011. Assuming that new facility equipment was deployed at the same time that the white space was opened up, the vast majority of facility equipment deployed in just over 80% is an average of 7.4 years old. Aging equipment is inefficient from a power-use perspective and is often incapable of supporting the highdensity racks that are becoming prevalent in the market. DCD believes that buyers will look to update facility equipment at a pace that exceeds the overall growth of the data center market. Figure 4: Hub city profile information, 2013 average sample ages of shell/building, facility equipment, and IT and networks 16 14.8 14 12 12.5 11.4 13 12.3 10 9.5 9.9 9.9 Years 8 6 4 2 8.4 6.1 8.4 7.7 7 4.5 5.6 3.3 6.5 5.1 5 6.3 3.7 6 4.1 8.6 8.6 4.6 3.4 6.2 6.2 6.1 6.4 4.6 4.9 4.8 4.3 4.4 4 4.2 4 4.7 4.3 3.4 0 New York Hong Kong Tokyo Chicago Sao Paulo London Frankfurt Singapore Shanghai Paris Mumbai Amsterdam Dubai Key IT & networks Shell/building Facility equipment Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 7 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Figure 5, which provides DCD census results regarding the focus of data center expansion activities, sheds further light on s infrastructure. In both 2012 and 2013, owners and operators polled by DCD reported that they were most likely to be refitting/refreshing existing facilities in fact, in 2013 80% of enterprises included in the DCD census were planning to refit or refresh some part of their data center asset base. This explains why facility equipment and (especially) IT and networking are newer than the shells they are housed in: Although 34% of 2013 respondents were engaged in building new data centers, higher proportions were extending existing data centers (46%), consolidating facilities (43%) and/ or relocating or migrating operations, most likely to a colo or cloud provider (37%). In some cases (such as the CenturyLink example referenced above), even new data center operations are deployed within older, existing shells. Figure 5: data center investment focus, 2012 and 2013 90 80 70 60 % Organizations 50 40 30 20 10 0 42% 80% 38% 46% 30% 43% 26% 37% 38% 34% Key Refit or refresh Extending existing data center Consolidation Relocation or migration Building a new data center 2013/14 2012/13 Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 8 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Data center spending in The rapid growth in data center white space and power usage demonstrates that there is substantial and growing demand for data center capacity in and around the city and from other Canadian centers that are looking for north-of-the-(us)-border hosting. How has this translated into spending on facilities and related services? To answer this question, DCD compiled estimates based on census data and other sources, isolating spending in three categories: Facility equipment power and cooling systems, as well as monitoring, DCIM and related technologies. IT optimization services and solutions systems and storage (including upgrades), virtualization, highperformance computing technology, etc. Outsourcing services hosting, cloud, colo, managed services and XaaS services. 9 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Results of this analysis, contained in Figure 6, find that facility equipment which is often very costly and generally needs to be deployed at a facility level in advance of IT products that are installed in lockstep with customer requirements is the largest of the three categories, with estimated total spending of $2.5 billion in 2012, up from $2.0 billion in 2011. IT optimization services and solutions also represent a major driver of data center expenditures; spending on these products and services will reach $1.9 billion in 2014, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.5% over the 2011-2014 time frame. And outsourcing services, driven by intense interest in cloud services, represent the fastestgrowing of the three data center expenditure categories: Spending on outsourcing services delivered through data centers has doubled in the past three years, growing from $600 million in 2011 to $1.2 billion in 2014. In all, data center investment has increased at an annual rate of 12.8% since 2011, from $3.9 billion to $5.6 billion in 2014. This increase is exceptional when viewed in the context of other global hubs, and especially compared with hubs in established economies: As Figure 7 demonstrates, s 2014 data center investment growth of 11.7% makes it the fourth-fastestgrowing major global market, and the fastest-growing outside of emerging-market centers Mumbai, Shanghai and Dubai. Figure 6: Investment in region data centers, 2011-2014 Category Includes 2011 2012 2013 2014 CAGR Facility equipment Power, cooling, monitoring, DCIM etc $ 2.0 billion $ 2.1 billion $ 2.4 billion $ 2.5 billion 7.7% IT optimization services & solutions Outsourcing services Systems and storage (including upgrades), virtualization, HP computing etc. Hosting, cloud, collocation, managed services, aas services $ 1.3 billion $ 1.5 billion $ 1.7 billion $ 1.9 billion 13.5% $ 0.6 billion $ 0.8 billion $ 1 billion $ 1.2 billion 26% TOTAL $ 3.9 billion $ 4.4 billion $ 5.1 billion $ 5.6 billion 12.8% Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 Figure 7: Hub cities: projected increases in data center Investment, 2014 18 16 Rate of increase 2013 to 2014 (%) 14 12 10 8 6 Note that 4 of the 5 highest rates of increase are in emerging economies; the 6 lowest are all established economies. 4 2 0 15.3% 13.7% 13.6% 11.7% 10.4% 9.7% 9.5% 9.3% 8.9% 8.8% 8.1% 8% 4.8% 4.4% Mumbai Shanghai Dubai Sao Paulo London New York Hong Kong Amsterdam Singapore Chicago Paris Frankfurt Tokyo Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 10 www.dcd-intelligence.com
What is driving investment? Deeper analysis of the DCD census data provides fascinating insight into the nature of data center investment. Figure 8 lists the 14 global hubs in the same order as they are arranged in Figure 7 that is, in descending order (left to right) of new investment in 2014. On the surface, it is difficult to explain why investment in is growing so quickly: The rate of increase in the number of facilities, power consumption and footprint outsourced is consistent with data for Tokyo, the lowest-growth market represented in the chart. To understand this data and its implications, we have to compare it with the data in Figure 5. There is a lack of new facilities because owners and operators are focusing on retrofits/refreshes, on extending existing data centers actions that drive new spending but do not result in new data center openings and on consolidation, which capitalizes on increased capacity within existing facilities but actually results in a net reduction in the number of data centers operating in the region. Figure 8: Hub cities: projected increases in asset base, 2014 14 13.3% 12 11.1% 11.6% Rate of increase 2013 to 2014 10 8 6 4 2 9.1% 6.2% 3.9% 10% 4.1% 3.9% 8.8% 5.6% 3.1% 5.8% 5% 6.7% 5.1% 4.2% 4.1% 4.3% 4% 2.2% 9.3% 5.1% 3.1% 5.5% 5.7% 7.8% 3.9% 3.1% 6.9% 4.5% 7.5% 5.8% 3.3% 5.8% 5% 0 Mumbai Shanghai Dubai 0.2% 1.7% Sao Paulo 1.5% London New York Hong Kong 0.7% Amsterdam Singapore Chicago 1.4% Paris Frankfurt 0.4% Tokyo Key Footprint outsourced Power consumption Number of facilities Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 11 www.dcd-intelligence.com
When we view data center investment by sector, we find that two industries IT services and colocation operators, and financial institutions collectively account for roughly half of total spending in the market. Comparing this data (contained in Figure 9) with the sectoral analysis presented in Figure 3 yields an interesting insight: Spending trends indicate that the finance and services sectors will account for a larger proportion of data center presence in the future, as investment levels by these sectors are greater than their current proportion of white space under management. Figure 9: region data center investment by sector, 2013 Other 12% Services 12% IT services & colo 28% Telecoms & Media 13% Server 61.6% Manufacturing & Industry 6% Government 8% Finance 21% Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 12 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Market development The DCD census also probes data center owners/operators for their level of near-term concern (in the next 12-18 months) regarding five key factors in effective data center operation: Availability of capex for new investment. Power availability the effect of blackouts or brownouts. Power costs. Skills shortages. Opex costs. Figure 10 presents the average results logged across the 14 major data center hubs (New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago, Sao Paulo,, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Shanghai, Paris, Mumbai, Amsterdam and Dubai) featured earlier in this report, and isolates the results in each area. The chart shows that power costs are the most significant overall issue for global data center operators (particularly in Tokyo and Singapore, but also across Europe), but that this is a relatively minor concern for data centers, which benefit from the hydroelectric and nuclear capacity of Ontario Power Generation (OPG) and other Ontario utilities. The quality and stability of power supply is also reflected in the fact that just 9% of data center owners/operators expressed concern about power availability. 13 www.dcd-intelligence.com
data center operators are especially concerned with available skills, which are cited as an operational concern by 25% of census respondents, versus an average of 20% across all of the major hubs included in this analysis. Skills are often an issue for Canadian IT operations, as the lure of higher-paying jobs in the US attracts Canadian professionals south across the easily-traversed border. This shouldn t provide a permanent or significant impediment to data center growth in it is relatively easy to acquire access to skilled professionals by signing service contracts with suppliers in Canada or the US but it might have an impact on labor costs, potentially bumping staff-related opex for owners and operators above current levels. The very low concern regarding power availability and relatively low concern regarding power cost are supported by the capabilities found in the Ontario power system. Ontario s power is very clean and comes from stable sources: According to statistics issued by the Ontario Energy Board (and found in its Ontario s System-Wide Electricity Supply Mix: 2013 Data report), nearly 58% of Ontario power is generated by nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric power accounts for another 23.4%. High-emission power sources, which attract regulatory attention and may attract carbon taxes in the future, do not figure prominently in Ontario s energy mix: Natural gas (including one plant that uses both natural gas and oil) is the source of 10.9% of Ontario s power supply, and just 2% is generated by coal-powered plants. As is the case in many jurisdictions, large power users (like data centers) get preferred rates for power; an Ontario power-supply organization, IESO, states on its website that any business that uses more than 250,000 kilowatt hours (kwh) of electricity per year equivalent to a minimum $2,000 electricity bill per month pays the wholesale market price. And although there are no national or province-wide incentives for data center operators, local utilities sometimes introduce programs that support the introduction of efficient technologies. For example, according to the website of Electrical Business magazine, Hydro-Electric offered an incentive of $300 per measurable peak kilowatt reduction. Figure 10: Levels of concern regarding key operating issues: and 14-hub average 30 25 20 % 15 10 5 0 Power Costs Increasing OPEX CAPEX availability Skills shortage Availability of power Key Average, 14 hubs Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 14 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Breakdown of opex for data centers DCD s data center research contains detailed information on operating costs. The results illustrate the costs that owners/ operators can expect from facilities based in, and how these compare with other North American centers. Results for and for North America an average calculated from DCD census responses from 29 urban centers in the US and Canada are presented in Figure 11. They show that power costs are by far the largest opex category for and North American data center operators, accounting for 30% of total operating expense in and 28% across North America indicating that although data center operators do not express high levels of concern about power availability or cost (see Figure 10), they have earmarked a sizable proportion of their budgets for electricity. The combined costs of maintaining the IT infrastructure network upgrades and maintenance, server upgrades and maintenance, and software licensing collectively account for 28% of opex in and in North American data centers, and upgrades to, and maintenance on, facilities equipment (MEP - mechanical, electrical and plumbing) account for an additional 12% of opex and 13% of North American opex, bringing total facility and IT upgrade and maintenance (including licensing) to 40% of opex and 41% of North American opex. The labor cost items illustrate an interesting difference between and other North American data center hubs. The combined categories of labor, staffing and consulting and outsourcing of facility management, maintenance and security account for 25% of opex in both and North America as a whole. However, data centers are more likely than their North American peers to rely on internally managed staffing and consulting (16% vs. 11%) and less likely to rely on outsourced resources (9% vs. 4%). Despite the relatively heavy use of staff, costs associated with consulting and staff support (2%) are actually lower than North American averages (4%), possibly because healthcare-related expenses are far lower in Canada than in the US. Looking forward, there are reasons to believe that several opex categories might shift somewhat in the future. s data center structures are among the oldest in the major data center hubs, and investment (as seen in Figure 5) is weighted toward expansion and retrofitting of these facilities, rather than the construction of new shells; this might imply that MEP (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) upgrade and maintenance will increase as a proportion of the overall pie. Similarly, as noted above, owners/operators are worried about the availability of skilled professionals, and the fix for this engaging contractors from Canadian or US-based services firms may also push prices up in this area, further expanding the gap between and North American average allocations to staff and consulting. The cost of power, on the other hand, tends to be relatively stable (especially since some data centers, such as CenturyLink s new TR3 facility in Markham, rely on their own generators as a primary power source), and the new IT and facilities equipment that is introduced into data centers tends to be more efficient than the products they replace, so it s possible that power costs will shrink somewhat as a proportion of overall opex. Figure 11: Opex cost breakdown, and North American averages 100 90 80 70 11% 9% 12% < 3% < 2% < 3% 4% 4% 11% 14% < 2% Key Power Labor, staffing & consulting 60 50 40 30 41 14% 16% 13% 13% 11% Network upgrade & maintenance MEP upgrade & maintenance Outsourcing of facility management, maintenance, security Server upgrade & maintenance Licencing Staff costs & training Other costs 20 10 0 30% Proportion of operating costs 28% Proportion of operating costs North American average Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 15 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Investment drivers The DCD census collects insight from data center owners/ operators on the factors driving new investment for the upcoming year. Figure 12 presents data for two periods: owners/operators in 2012 commenting on 2012/2013 investments, and owners/operators in 2013 commenting on 2013/2014 investments. Looking across both years, we see quickly that investments are guided primarily by a desire to increase operational efficiency: The most common investment driver in both years was reduce operating costs, and the second most prominent answer, adopt virtualization/cloud, also suggests prioritization of cost control, since virtualization reduces many different operating expenses, including power for IT equipment, power for cooling infrastructure and staff/ management costs. Increased capacity is also identified as a key investment driver, as data centers struggle to keep pace with burgeoning demand for IT services. Improved space usage was actually somewhat less important for census participants in 2013 (looking at 2014) than in 2012 (looking at 2013), perhaps as a result of increased rack densities, which speak to progress in improving space utilization. Three categories showed a substantial and intriguing increase in importance in 2013/2014: Respondents who are investing in response to end of facility life now represent nearly one-third of all census participants, up from just over 25% in 2012/2013. This suggests that aging facilities and buildings and facility equipment are prompting investments in some of the areas (refits/refreshes or extensions of existing facilities, consolidation) highlighted earlier in this document, and supports our contention that facility upgrades/ maintenance will consume an increasing proportion of opex and, as result, create even more impetus for change/improvement. The need to improve sustainability may well arise from multiple points. On the one hand, sustainable data centers tend to also be operationally efficient data centers. On the other, there is a direct link between sustainability in the data center and overall corporate sustainability initiatives: Scope 2 emissions are the largest source of emissions in most industries and result almost entirely from electricity use, and data centers are the biggest source of electricity consumption for many companies. Continued awareness of both issues may make sustainability an even more important factor in data center investment and planning over time. The finding that legislative requirements and compliance is a data center investment driver is interesting. As the processes governing key aspects of business operations (such as the management/ maintenance of personally identifiable information, or PII) become more IT-centric, and as all aspects of security become ever more reliant on IT, business leaders are coming to understand that the quality of their data center facilities is an important factor in their ability to comply with regulatory requirements. At the highest level, Figure 12 provides evidence that although there is a relatively high level of variation in the specific subjects that compel investment activity in a year, two enduring issues cost control and risk reduction are at the root of most new investment in data center infrastructure. Figure 12: region data center investment drivers, 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 50 45 40 35 30 % 25 20 15 10 5 0 43% Reduce operating costs 36% 37% 34% 32% 27% 25% 27% 32% 26% 32% 24% 25% 24% 23% 23% 20% 21% 21% 15% Adopt virtualization, cloud Increase IT capacity Improve space usage End of facility life Improve sustainability Improve redundancy Increase power into facility Changed corporate requirements Legislative requirements & compliance Key 2013/14 2012/13 Source: DCD Intelligence Global Census, 2014 16 www.dcd-intelligence.com
Market development In a curious way, benefits from the fact that it is like the US without actually being in the US. It is one of the largest municipalities in North America, and the GTA is home to millions of skilled workers, a vibrant financial sector, and several globally recognized universities. However, it is not in the US, meaning that the data residing in its data centers at least, in data centers that are not operated by US-based companies has some degree of protection from the US Patriot Act and may (depending on transmission routes) be outside the recognized boundaries of NSA traffic scrutiny. The depth and scale of s infrastructure is of obvious importance to enterprises considering it as a data center hub; the not US location is important to Canadian businesses (and those in other countries), which worry about data sovereignty and the specter of US oversight of confidential information, and the privacy, regulatory and customerrelationship issues that this may raise. It can be argued (though less convincingly after the Snowden disclosures) that this fear of US surveillance is overblown. Even if it is, has many market factors that recommend it as a hub for data center investment and activity. Viewed as Canada s leading business/finance/technology hub, has a massive 35-million-inhabitant local market, plus excellent network and power resources, ready access to major US-based customers, and strong, ongoing data center growth. To be sure, there are shadows on the horizon: Aging infrastructure may affect facility reliability, competition could intensify from non-canadian hubs or secondary Canadian markets, and, most importantly, a lack of skilled local labor may have a near-term effect on both cost and agility. However, Canadian firms have traditionally compensated for a lack of skilled resources by relying heavily on third-party service providers, and with cloud, colo and managed services, there are multiple well-recognized paths that can increase the use of the skilled professionals who live and work in the region. On balance, is and will remain in an enviable position in the data center world: It offers the high growth potential associated with emerging economies coupled with the institutional stability of an established nation. We anticipate strong growth in the data center market for at least the next several years. 17 www.dcd-intelligence.com
About the DCD Census Data presented in this DCD Intelligence Market Abstract is drawn from the DatacenterDynamics Global Census. An expansion of research conducted at DCD events starting in 2006, the census was launched in 2011 and has grown to cover nearly 2,500 data center owners and operators in more than 30 countries. DCD first collected data on the market in 2008; has been included in the census since its launch in 2011. 18 www.dcd-intelligence.com
About the Author Michael O Neil is a frequent keynote speaker and has led business-strategy workshops around the world. InsightaaS is a boutique consulting/media firm dedicating to exploring the why in enterprise technology. InsightaaS acts as a consultant to both technology suppliers and corporate IT and business managers and has published on many critical IT/business topics, including cloud computing, data center facilities and IT equipment, analytics and big data, collaboration, mobility, sustainable IT, and IT channel and alliance strategy. O Neil is the author of the cloud strategy book The Death of Core Competency: A management guide to cloud computing and the zero-friction future. 19 www.dcd-intelligence.com
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