Remember when the entirety of the data center business was made up of a couple “wholesale providers,” Equinix, and a mass of “colocation” companies that were often comprised of a savvy “entrepreneur” who hosted your server in a garage somewhere with cooling provided by all the household fans that they could plug into a power strip? Certainly, things have ebbed and flowed since then, but in terms of the volume of market participants we must be at an all-time high. Not a day seems to go by without my reading an article referencing some new market entrant. Folks, right now you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some heretofore unknown or new data center provider.
Let me begin by saying that I certainly don’t view this tsunami of new competitors as a bad thing. Like they say, “It’s a free country.” So if you want to make being a data center provider your thing, go ahead, step up to the plate and take your cuts. I’m not sure if this is an entrepreneurial trend, but I’ll bet you could pick-up more than a few McDonald’s franchises on the cheap right now.