Data Centers: 76% of CIOs either will be deploying into colocation/wholesale data centers (33% of respondents) or are still considering their deployment strategy (43%), highlighting the room for growth that multi-tenant data centers (MTDCs) have, as the plurality of respondents are still assessing IT deployment strategy. Over half of CIOs expect to shutdown enterprise-owned data centers going forward, another supportive indicator for the growth of the MTDC industry. That said, only 36% expect to grow their colocation footprints in 2020 y/y, emphasizing our view that there will be clear winners and losers in 2020. A key factor driving those winners and losers will be interconnection, in our view. Over half of respondents (55%) noted the increasing importance of interconnection services at colocation data centers, supporting up our view and aligning with our 2020 thesis around data center adoption, highlighted in our 2020 Outlook.
Interestingly, 61% of CIOs noted that they do not use multiple colocation providers in their strategy, which we found surprising, showing how one vendor can be the sole provider of colo. Infrastructure for certain customers.
Figures 7 and 8 show that the Hybrid Cloud has few doubters, as 16% of respondents view it to be a disruptive technology over the next 3-5 years, while only 11% find it to be overrated technology. Meanwhile, 5G remains a polarizing technology with 25% viewing it as disruptive and an even greater share (28%) viewing it as overrated in the next 3-5 years. AI/Machine Learning (ML) is an overwhelming favorite to be a disruptor over the half decade. We note that while IaaS and Edge Computing were not leaders as picks to be disruptors (14% & 13%), the technologies are also proven to have many current real-world applications and therefore were not highly chosen as overrated technologies (14% & 10%) either.
