“ What we ’ re seeing is a mosaic of services coalescing around the data centre in ways that haven ’ t happened before ”
Staggered Evolution and a Cloud Revolution From a regulatory perspective , the process of freeing up markets and reducing barriers to entry started in the US about 25 years ago when the company deregulated in a way that meant data centres were no longer the sole province of telecom operators . A decade later , Europe did the same . “ Five years ago , that same process started happening in Asia ,” Davidson explains . “ What you ' re seeing now is that the tier one markets - Japan , Singapore , Hong Kong , and Australia - are already open . Then you have the tier two markets like South Korea , India , and Taiwan which are starting to follow suit . There are still a number of tier three markets in Asia that haven ' t really opened up yet but will probably start to do so over the next few years .”
Intersecting with the deregulation of APAC ’ s data centre industry is a dramatic increase in cloud adoption throughout the region . It ’ s this entry of overseas firms ( as well as diversification and growth from domestic players ), twinned with widespread
“ What we ’ re seeing is a mosaic of services coalescing around the data centre in ways that haven ’ t happened before ”
ROBERT DAVIDSON DIRECTOR OF NETWORK SERVICES APAC , DIGITAL REALITY
digital transformation , that ’ s driving the “ mosaic of services ” that Davidson describes .
As a result , he explains , things are getting a lot more complicated . “ If we were talking 10 years ago , we ' d be talking quite generally about a ‘ data centre ’; now , we can ' t have that same simplified conversation ,” he says . Traditionally , data centres were - as Davidson
64 December 2021