Data center market will show massive change over the next two years
Four major factors will bring about dramatic change in the data center market by the end of 2016
The factors are: highly disruptive competition, big cloud provider dominance, economic warfare, and nationalism. All of these will occur with different intensities over different time frames but will have a significant impact on the market.
Outlining the likely impact of each factor 10Gtek says that there are a number of potentially disruptive technologies that can spark changes to the business model. Things like software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage, network function virtualization; extreme low-energy processors have the potential to release latent demand for improvements.
The dominance of big cloud providers like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft is likely to see a shift away from traditional managed service providers as they find it harder to compete. This may well have a strong influence on the price of data center architecture.
Economic warfare may create an increasing east versus west divide. 10Gtek predicts that China, thanks to deep resources, increasingly respected brands and strong original design manufacturers, will improve its share of the data center market at the expense of western companies.
Finally nationalism, driven by the "Snowden effect" is likely to see a shift to locally developed and based providers as buyers lose trust in the ability of big players to protect their data.
Although the data center market looks set to grow it can't be assumed that existing predictions will hold true. Alan, CEO at 10Gtek says, "Underneath this calm surface, increasing market pressures are driving a change in vendor behaviors, which, along with the four disruptive factors, make the market ripe for a period of major disruption. These behaviors will become more obvious as the pace of change increases".
