More and more frequently, multi-tenant data centers are becoming completely service neutral in order to boost their performance and their attractiveness to potential customers. This may seem counter intuitive because it’s assumed that a data center that can offer its own managed services or cloud platforms has turned itself into a convenient one-stop shop, but this model actually hurts both the customer and the data center, and customers are becoming wise to this fact.
Nowadays, when a company shops around for data center services, service neutrality has jumped to the top of their list of requirements. Why? The larger the pool of managed service providers (MSP) and carriers they have to choose from, the more these providers compete for their business, the better the product, and the lower the price. Cloud service providers (CSP), MSPs, and value added resellers (VAR) in particular choose data center partners that don’t offer anything besides colocation to avoid putting themselves in direct competition with any services offered by the house and to maximize their sales opportunities. In this new model, data centers turn into eco-centers for CSPs, MSPs, and VARs that mutually benefit all parties involved. And the data centers themselves can focus on what they do best: colocation.