Hyperscalers MARKET REPORT
from the public cloud. But things
aren’t always as harmonious as
some would like…”
Hybrid IT has been a growing
trend in enterprise infrastructure
in the past few years and you
can see why. Organisations want
to exploit the wealth of their
investments in one hand, while
retaining people, process and
technology in the other.
In the past, customers
deciding to pivot to public cloud
either had the luxury of being
‘born in the cloud’ or had a
compelling reason to move. is
could be due to the expiry of a
data centre contract for example.
e prospect of a long-term
commitment and capital outlay,
despite it not forming part of
their wider digital transformation
objectives, is a dicult pill to
swallow.
“What’s been missing
throughout,” says Rogers, “is the
ability for enterprises to undergo
that transformation in their own
time. is would allow proper
planning and execution while
bringing all the benets of cloud
along with them.
With these new technologies,
customers are able to extend
their hosted or private cloud
environments. is allows
using cloud to bring elasticity
and agility to their traditional
applications while retaining
the networking, security and
personnel skills they’ve evolved
over the years.”
State Of Play For Smaller
Players
Simon Smith, founder and CEO
of Extrinsica Global, a Microsoftaccredited
1 and 2 Tier Cloud
SolutionProvider that provides
bespoke cloud solutions as an
end-to-end fully managed service,
says that as the cloud market
matures, the roles of tech players
is transforming rapidly.
“Roles established in the old
‘provide-it-yourself’ IT market
are rapidly becoming less relevant
in the cloud market. Some global
vendors – Google, Amazon
and Microsoft- were far-sighted
enough to create strategies to
become core players in the
“From serverless, to artificial intelligence (AI); data analytics and more;
all of these provide untapped opportunity.” Tristan Rogers, Fujitsu
Hyperscale operators
are aggressively growing
their share of key cloud
service markets, which
are themselves growing at
impressive rates
©Evgen3d-stock.adobe.com
new era of cloud by becoming
‘hyperscale’ cloud vendors.
Using their enormous economies
of scale, they now provide the
overwhelming majority of cloudbased
compute and storage for
cloud solutions – Infrastructure
as a Cloud Service.
What this means is that
previously separate vendor roles
like hardware sales, software sales,
‘hosting’ and managed service
providers have lost their place in
the market, with role convergence
fast become a dening feature of
the emerging cloud market.”
Basic Ingredients
Smith raises the question that
with more and more of our
cloud-based computing power
being supplied by a very small
group of hyperscale vendors, are
we headed towards a completely
regimented market-place with
little choice or does this create
new opportunities for the smaller
market players that have emerged
in recent years?
“e appetite in business to
continue the provide-it-yourself
IT model is declining rapidly – it
has too many disadvantages.
Major providers have played
to their strengths, building
hyper-scale cloud infrastructures
and individual cloud services.
But does this mean they have
cornered the cloud market? e
answer is yes and no. Yes, they’re
on track to own much of the
global Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS) market but these are only
the basic ingredients of cloud
solutions.
Today’s businesses want to
move completely away from the
provide-it-yourself model for IT
and move to a ‘consumption’
model – simply using the
business tools they need to run
the business and improve their
competitive capability but not
having to build, operate and
manage it for themselves. IaaS,
even at hyperscale, does little on
its own to enable businesses to do
this; it simply shifts the compute
and storage to the cloud. What’s
more, larger players know that it’s
an impractical business model for
them to try and build complete,
bespoke cloud solutions for, say,
companies of between 250 and
1000 seats.”
So, the starting point for
smaller players is to not try and
compete with the hyperscale
vendors on their core oering –
IaaS. e opportunity for smaller
providers is their proximity to
and understanding of customer
needs.
Smaller players are much
more able to be agile, exible
and responsive to customer
requirements than hyperscaler.
“erefore,” says Smith, “for
smaller, innovative businesses,
it’s about optimising the
fantastic opportunities that the
hyperscalers have created through
the provision of high-quality
cloud infrastructures, available at
accessible cost.
Using these high quality,
reasonably-priced raw ingredients,
smaller players – Cloud Solution
Providers – can design, provision,
build, as well as manage, operate
and support complete, sometimes
complex, cloud solutions so that
all customer businesses have to
do is consume what they need to
run their business. In this way,
smaller players can transform
the hyperscalers’ raw ingredients
into a complete, immediately
consumable solution that adds
substantial value for customer
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MARKET FORECASTS
Cisco estimates that by 2021, traffic within hyperscale data centres will
quadruple, and hyperscale data centres will account for 55% of all data
centre traffic by 2021. This growth will only continue as the hyperscale
data centre market is expected to reach $80.65 billion by 2022, according to
MarketsandMarkets.
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