The Award Winning Serverfarm Strategy

Cloudify your data center with InCommand

Serverfarm’s technical and investment expertise is reshaping the data center and the market – 2020 will see its strategy expand.

M&A activity in 2019 saw a lot of horizontal integration with large REITs buying regional players.

It also saw a lot of hyperscale hyperbole about how only large clouds would provide everything that was once delivered by the enterprise data center.

But the first raises the question of whether industry consolidation can provide CIOs and CTOs with all that they need when what it provides is more single source offerings from global players.

The second raises questions about whether all enterprises want the same vanilla data center.

We believe data center, technology and business leaders also require vertically integrated solutions through working with a player whose investment strategy brings to market modernized, enterprise-grade data center capacity which already houses enterprise apps.

Hyperscale data centers have many things to offer but they can’t fulfil all the capacity, connectivity and latency requirements of a corporate enterprise – as was the initial purpose of the enterprise data center.

Look at what is driving corporate thinking today and in almost every vertical market sector from finance to media to transport to healthcare, AI and machine learning, digital transformation, 5G, IoT and Edge are reshaping business, supply chains and customer interaction. It is driving requirements for latency and connectivity with the goal of getting closer to and gaining a better understanding of the customer. The deployment of these game-changing technologies and successful transformation strategies do not lend themselves to a one-size-fits-all data center approach. For example, AI is resource intensive and the reality is that unlike Serverfarm, many data center operators simply cannot meet customer needs for high density infrastructure. (Learn how Serverfarm meets these requirements)

Reshaping the data center

Serverfarm is reshaping the data center and the market. How? Consider this, when viewed as part of the commercial property sector, data centers are one of the most inefficient real estate businesses, often only managing 30% utilization. By modernizing data centers and transforming how they are operated, Serverfarm is bringing utilization rates up to 80% – matching the hyperscalers. It is also extracting additional MWs of power from existing facilities. In fact, Serverfarm recently took home the gold at the DCD>Awards for Data Center Modernization Project of the Year.

Serverfarm’s approach has been recognized through the award-winning modernization of its SF LON1 London data center. The company won two SDC Awards – Digital Transformation Project of the Year and Hosting/Colocation Innovation of the Year – both celebrating this project. Read about the data center digital transformation here.

Serverfarm’s other differentiator is in what it offers the market. Here we see two big trends. Enterprises want to be freed from owning and operating cost and capital-intensive data center and IT infrastructure and move to more cloud-like as a service infrastructure. At the same time, in the commercial data center space, firms are starting to see some leases end and others shorten.

There are questions as to whether hyperscalers are renewing or shortening leases with commercial players as they bring their own data centers online. At the same time, for corporate customers, the reality of signing a 15-year deal to secure capacity is no longer an option for many CIOs. Enterprises want cloud-like services and will not sign up for multi-year leases.

Serverfarm anticipated these market trends and while others may be scrambling to ‘cloudwash’ their data centers, Serverfarm is meeting CIO needs through InCommand, the cloud platform for management and optimization of data center and IT infrastructure.

InCommand is the foundation of Serverfarm’s unique proposition of true virtualized cloud infrastructure on flexible, cloud-like terms that solve real customer problems.

2020 strategy

In the last quarter of 2019, Serverfarm made several key strategic announcements. In October, the company acquired 5NINES Global Holdings, a UK-headquartered data center operator with an international customer base. In November Serverfarm acquired a 194,000 sq. ft data center in Amsterdam.

2020 will see Serverfarm continue to focus on solving customers’ problems and opening up opportunities. In data center infrastructure terms, that means having the best facilities in the best locations. Enterprises with underutilized, costly, depreciating data center assets continue to turn to Serverfarm to transform the economics and operation of their infrastructure through Data Center Operations Transformation and Data Center Economics Transformation.  And Serverfarm will continue to bring to market some of the world’s best run, award-winning data centers.