MARKET REPORT Hyperscalers
Are Hyperscalers
Homogenising Cloud Services?
According to Synergy Research Group, there are currently 24 global companies defined as hyperscalers who
together account for 68% of the cloud services sector and operate around 320 data centres worldwide. So will huge
companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba and Amazon, currently dominating public cloud services leave
sufficient crumbs for the smaller players?
It’s no wonder that with the
ever increasing volume of
data being created that the
communications and IT
sector is continually exploring
new ways of storing, distributing
and serving up that data to
enterprises hungry to consume
it for commercial purposes that
range from cloud based business
processing applications to analysis
of ‘big data’ for insights in to
how they can gain commercial
advantage.
Hence, over recent years
we have witnessed the rise of
the so termed ‘Hyperscalers’,
which in computing means
the ability of an architecture to
scale appropriately as increased
demand is added to the system.
at scalability is seamless and
involves a robust system with
exible memory, networking, and
storage capabilities.
So, who are the Hyperscalers
and what do they provide?
You’ll know a lot of the names,
and they all have the deep
pockets required to support the
billions of dollars needed to invest
in the table stakes; Amazon,
Microsoft and IBM for example.
New data from Synergy
Research Group shows that
hyperscale operators are
aggressively growing their share
of key cloud service markets,
which are themselves growing at
impressive rates.
Synergy’s new research has
identied 24 companies that
meet its denition of hyperscale,
and in 2016 those companies in
Will huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba and Amazon,
currently dominating public cloud services?
aggregate accounted for 68% of
the cloud infrastructure services
market (IaaS, PaaS, private
hosted cloud services) and 59%
of the SaaS market. Hyperscale
operators typically have hundreds
of thousands of servers in their
data centre networks, while the
largest, such as Amazon and
Google, have millions of servers.
In aggregate those 24 hyperscale
operators now have almost
320 large data centres in their
networks, with many of them
having substantial infrastructure
in multiple countries.
e scale of infrastructure
investment required to be a
©Gorodenko-stock.adobe.com
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 centre infrastructure
equipment – servers, storage,
networking, network security
and associated software.
“Hyperscale operators are now
dominating the IT landscape
in so many dierent ways,” said
John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst
and Research Director at Synergy
Research Group. “ey 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 ve years.”
The Evolving Hybrid Reality
With much of the hyperscale
market seemingly sewn up by a
small number of suppliers, how
then can the smaller players
leverage this scalable on-demand
technology?
Tristan Rogers at Fujitsu,
a company that has its own
VMWare Cloud running on
AWS service, says moving to the
cloud is often seen as a priority
for organisations today. However,
this is simple to say, but not
always simple to do.
“An enterprise scale
organisation may have spent
years cultivating and developing
a hosted or private cloud
environment. ere are dened
processes and governance in place
and it’s understood across all
departments.
At the same time there’s the
public cloud and the rich feature
set on oer. From serverless, to
articial intelligence (AI); data
analytics and more; all of these
provide untapped opportunity.
Both of these worlds bring
benets to the organisation. You
have the security; structure and
governance provided around
your private cloud or hosted
environment, and the riches on
oer at the touch of a button
36 | Comms Business Magazine | April 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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