‘Super 7’ accelerate cloud, says TBR

A report identified the seven largest (“Super 7”) technology firms which are best positioned to provide access to cloud services for global firms.

Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent also view their cloud businesses as critical to their growth over at least the next five years, a report from Technology Business Research (TBR) said.

Chris Antlitz, a telecom senior analyst at TBR, said “All of the Super 7 companies are aggressively building data center footprints globally and are baking in significantly more capacity than they currently need in anticipation of future data traffic growth.”

“However, despite the addition of extra capacity upfront, capex growth will remain robust through the next five years as workloads increasingly move to the cloud and as the digital ecosystem flourishes worldwide,” the analyst said.

Of the $16.9 billion in capex spent by the “Super 7” on ICT in 2016, TBR estimates around 75% was for data center infrastructure, with the balance of ICT capex spent primarily on optical transport, routers, switches, software and broadband access initiatives.

The report said the Super 7 are investing heavily on not only data centers to support the internal operations of their core businesses, but also for their external cloud services businesses, which are growing much faster than their core digital businesses.

Some vendors are gaining traction with webscale companies, with revenues increasing and the scope of engagements widening. Generally speaking, vendors that align their portfolios and innovation road maps with webscale requirements stand to win the most business from webscale companies.

TBR’s Webscale ICT Market Landscape tracks the ICT-related initiatives of the seven largest webscale companies in the world. The report provides a market assessment, deep dives into company strategies and analyzes capex trends, particularly as they pertain to ICT. Vendors are also covered from the perspective of relative opportunities with webscale companies as customers.