Stu Elby of Infinera provided a really detailed introspective on DCI last week. The article is on Lightwave:
http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/2016/07/segmenting-t…
Stu gave us a few nuggets to mine in this writeup.
Here’s one of them after reading between the lines: Cloud Xpress has a pretty good lock on the ICP customer segment, and the ICP’s represent 50% of the DCI market. This segment has been growing like gangbusters and it isn’t slowing down.
The article’s lead in gives us the reasoning behind our inflection point:
What drives this surge in spending? Multiple factors are at work, but two stand out:
Data center to data center traffic (server-to-server) is growing much faster than data center to user due to distributed application design and replication. In addition, for performance and cost reasons, large cloud and content providers need to locate data centers closer to the end customers, which has resulted in the rapid development and growth of metro data centers. Unlike rural mega data centers, cloud providers typically build multiple smaller data centers in heavily populated metro areas due to the cost and availability of real estate and power. The result is a large number of metro data centers that require a high degree of interconnectivity.
IT organizations have finally begun to adopt the cloud in an aggressive fashion. Whether the approach leverages software as a service (SaaS) applications such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft 365, or migration of some or all back office infrastructure into third-party data centers running infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the “chasm” has been crossed.
I can personally vouch for the second point. Two years ago our customers weren’t budging on the notion of moving their data and applications to the cloud. Today, and for over the past several months the cloud is no longer a discussion point but an assumed deployment strategy.
Stu also gave us a long haul nugget. Within the article Stu makes reference to another article also on Lightwave: http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/2016/05/microsoft-fa…
We have seen a large increase in ICP-owned/operated terrestrial networks; Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have opted to build their own subsea networks as well
Sure you can point to any old article that you will, but that article has particular relevence. I posted a note about it a while back speculating Infinera was likely involved. Here’s why: 1) the infrastructure is provided by Telefonica’s new networking operating company Telxius (be on the lookout for a forthcoming IPO), 2) Telefonica is an Infinera Long Haul customer and 3) the access point location in Virginia Beach already has Infinera equipment.
So, for me at least, Stu provided a little more validation on this hunch.
I think there are a few other nuggets to mine, but at first blush those two really stood out to me.
Best,
–Kevin