To address data center closures, consolidation, migrations as well as emerging core-to-edge initiatives, organizations look towards colocation providers to provide additional services besides the traditional space, power and cooling. Today, the lines of distinction between retail, wholesale and managed service providers are blurred by colocation providers offering additional services to address hybrid and digital transformation initiatives. Organizations use colocation services with data center interconnect fabrics to integrate multiple applications, data types and data sources in a secure, predictable, lower-latency fashion enabling digital business success. In many cases, data centers are transforming into noncore, remote facilities relegated to non-x86 workloads and legacy applications. Some colocation providers offer interconnection services to enable edge-to-core digital objectives.
Enterprise Networking and Communications refers to the products and services that enable secure, scalable, and high-performance connectivity and communication across distributed enterprise environments. This category includes markets that focus on core and edge networking, unified communications, private and public mobile networks, and managed network services—supporting digital transformation, and operational efficiency.
Gartner defines managed hybrid cloud hosting as a standardized, productized hosting offering that combines a cloud-enabled system infrastructure (CESI) platform — consisting of a pool of compute, network and storage hardware — and cloud infrastructure framework software to facilitate self-service and rapid provisioning. It also either includes documented and standardized management for a hyperscale public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform or for an IaaS platform with managed services. The geographic focus of this market is North America.