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Hyperscale cloud providers becoming increasingly dominant

Kgaogelo Letsebe
By Kgaogelo Letsebe, Portals journalist
Johannesburg, 09 Feb 2018
Hyperscale providers are increasingly dominating the cloud sector, says Michael Needham, senior manager: solutions architecture at Amazon Web Services.
Hyperscale providers are increasingly dominating the cloud sector, says Michael Needham, senior manager: solutions architecture at Amazon Web Services.

Hyperscale providers are increasingly dominating the cloud sector and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

This is according to Michael Needham, senior manager: solutions architecture at Amazon Web Services (AWS), who was speaking at the ITWeb Cloud Summit 2018 at Vodacom World in Midrand yesterday.

Needham adds: "According to the Gartner research released last year, dominance of the hyperscale providers is now, for the first time, eating into the rest of the other players that provide cloud infrastructure. Some of the hyperscale providers who are working from a smaller base are in 100% growth rates and AWS, which works off a larger base, is sitting at 45% year-on-year growth - and that was in the last quarter of 2017 which makes us a $20 billion revenue business going into 2018. There is clear trend that privately managed infrastructure will increasingly become transient or for niche purposes."

He further explains that although hyperscale was initially focused on major international markets, Africa is increasingly becoming a priority as the sector has grown significantly claiming a share of the cloud infrastructure service market. "Large players are starting to turn their attention to Africa and in so doing encouraging infrastructure development in the country," he said.

Last year, Microsoft announced its intentions to build their first hyperscale data centres in Africa - picking out Johannesburg and Cape Town as the initial cities. Similarly, Teraco also unveiled a number of data centres around Gauteng, with the latest being its Riverfields Hyperscale Centre in Johannesburg east.

Lex van Wyk, CEO, Teraco, adds that hyperscale computing is on the rise, despite the slow take-off. "Hyperscale computing has grown enormously, as has demand for co-location facilities. These trends combined are shaping the way forward for Africa and we anticipate significant uptake as more service providers pinpoint Africa as a growth market. The high demand now is driven by big data and cloud computing, as well as enterprise organisations that consume these services locally. Many of which have not been available locally or are only in limited functionality due to restrictions presented by high latencies due to distance."

Commenting on the Microsoft investment, Needham says AWS intends also make strides in Africa although there are no set dates at this point. "I think Microsoft's investment is great for cloud in general and it does put all other cloud providers under pressure. We have announced openly that we are coming to the African continent - I don't have dates as yet but we will all have to wait and see."

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