Fifteen years ago, data center engineers had literally thousands of potential clients in the United States with data centers — plenty of work to go around, right? As the enterprise data centers move to colocation (colo) or the cloud, the number of potential data center clients gets reduced to approximately 50. Yes 50. Only 50 colo/cloud clients housing thousands of enterprise data centers are in the United States — in which we are all competing for their data center design work. This includes the top five cloud providers that are building out  hundreds of MW of data centers annually. And while yes, the projects are much bigger than they used to be with the enterprise clients, the quantities of data center potential clients are coming down. I’ve been working on a 2018 business plan, with a realization that in the future there will only be 50 or less potential data center clients nationally. That’s scary when you consider a long-term strategy.