Would A Post-Merger Telecity And Interxion Overtake Equinix In The EMEA Colo Market?

This week, TelecityGroup and Interxion announced that both parties had reached a non-binding agreement to merge. This is likely to be completed by the second half of 2015, and will result in the merged company surpassing Equinix in the EMEA colocation market, according to data from Synergy Research.

The data points towards the two data centre providers and the resulting company becoming the market leader in the UK and the Netherlands, the number two ranked retail colo provider in Spain and Switzerland, and the number three ranked operator in Germany and France.

15 percent colocation share

Basing the research on third quarter 2014 figures, Synergy said that the merged Telecity/Interxion powerhouse would have a 15 percent share of the EMEA retail colocation market, compared to Equinix’s 9 percent.

Equinix yesterday responded to the merger news with EMEA president Eric Schwartz claiming that his firm is “confident in our ability to meet the demands of today’s most sophisticated CIOs with our platform of highly interconnected data centres”.

Schwartz said: “There’s no question that positive secular trends, including cloud, big data and mobile, are driving significant data center demand around the world so this announcement is in line with what we’re seeing in the market. And, as enterprises operate increasingly interconnected, on-demand business models it’s imperative they have a global data center strategy.

“Today, more than half of Equinix’s business is derived from customers located in all three of the regions in which we operate — EMEA, Asia-Pacific and the Americas — because they can access a critical mass of networks and easily connect to leading cloud services.”

As well as the previously mentioned EMEA markets where the merged Interxion/Telecity would have a strong foothold, both parties have data centres along with healthy market share in countries such as Ireland, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Finland.

Retail colocation: Growing at 10%

“The retail colocation market continues to grow at around 10 percent per year, boosted by trends in big data, cloud services, outsourcing and video/social networking,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

“As the market continues to grow it is no surprise that the major operators are driving to expand to expand their geographic footprint. M&A (mergers and acquisitions) can achieve growth goals much more quickly than organic growth and we continue to see a constant stream of deals to expand data center footprint and market presence.”

Currently the EMEA region accounts for 33 percent of the worldwide retail colocation market.

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