Lead analyst: Rahiel Nasir, Datacenter Services & Infrastructure Analyst


Multi-tenant datacenter providers in the UAE’s retail colocation market are currently providing 305,000 square feet of powered floor space, with local telco Etisalat as the clear leader. According to Rahiel Nasir and data from 451 Research’s Datacenter KnowledgeBase, that market is expected to grow to about 350,000 square feet by the end of 2020. While retail colocation providers typically see incremental growth through smaller deals, demand across the UAE market is likely to remain at 50-60% in the coming years.

Contributed by Principal Analyst Carl Lehmann


According to our latest Voice of the Enterprise – Digital Pulse: Budgets & Outlook survey data, 58% of respondents indicated that their current IT environments are either highly or mostly reliant on manual processes. As these businesses move toward digital transformation, these organizations need to be able to tackle new IT projects that will allow them to adapt to digital disruption, adopt new technologies, and meet new business objectives. Automation is a key tool that can allow IT teams to refocus their time on these new projects. Thus, it is sensible that 75% of VotE respondents indicated they expect to increase their automation investment in the next 12 months.

I see this trend as a key driver for digital business and the future of hybrid IT as businesses transform for the future. This will be an important element as I collect my insights for my presentation – “Automation Effectiveness – Are You Prepared to Compete for the Future?” – at the 15^th annual Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit this coming September. Register today to get the insights you will need as you navigate the digital revolution.

Our enterprise survey research shows a clear trend toward cloud-based workload deployment (on-premises private cloud, hosted private cloud, IaaS and SaaS), rising from 45% today to 60% by 2019. At the same time, organizations anticipate that a slim majority of enterprise workloads will run in off-premises IT environments by 2019, and more than one-third of all workloads will operate in public cloud environments.

Although workload distribution across deployment venues is edging toward cloud environments, our research shows that overall spending on in-house infrastructure and resources is holding steady. Enterprise IT environments will evolve over the next few years as organizations shift and modernize existing workloads and develop net new applications built for – and in – the cloud. This transition offers IT service providers and technology vendors the opportunity to position themselves as strategic partners and trusted advisors to organizations looking to implement 'right mix' workload placement strategies, develop dynamic workload optimization approaches and tap into third-party infrastructure/application management for evolving IT environments.

Our VotE: Cloud Transformation, Workloads and Key Projects survey, conducted in March and April 2017, includes more than 700 completed surveys from IT decision-makers about cloud adoption, application workloads and technologies.

According to the latest Voice of the Enterprise: Hosting and Cloud Managed Services study, enterprises expect growth in hosting and cloud services spending to outpace growth in overall IT spending by 25.8% to 12%. This trend applies across almost every vertical market and company size category, but is most pronounced among large businesses (1,000-9,999 employees), which expect an average of 33.3% growth in hosting and cloud services spending.

Adoption profiles differ significantly by company size in terms of both rate of adoption and drivers, which reinforces the idea that company size is not just a category distinction; it is indicative of markets with very different hosting and cloud services characteristics. This tells us there is an extremely compelling business case for specialization, and this is one of the reasons the hosting and cloud services market is served by such a wide variety of vendors and vendor types.

451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise: Hosting and Cloud Managed Services tracks and analyzes the disruption occurring in the market today and exposes the major opportunities for enterprises, IT vendors, suppliers and investors. In addition to the regularly quarterly topics, this latest survey focuses on enterprise IT budgets, including the portions focused on hosting and cloud services, and covers current spending and forecasts for 2017.