Blog: The Advisor

In today’s business environment new technologies are constantly being introduced that can revolutionize an entire industry overnight. Many organizations are realizing 5G may be the next big thing that will reshape how they operate.

Technology, IT services, and providers are constantly changing in today's marketplace. It's hard to keep up with the latest news. Here are a few notable articles to keep you up to date on the latest news in Data Center, Cloud, Security, Tech Transformation, and more.

In previous posts, we looked at Telecom and Data Center acquisition activity from 2016.

The past year was a big one for telecom M&A.

Acquisitions significantly impacted the data center industry in 2016 and will continue to do so as competition increases and data center operators look to expand.

We saw a record number of mergers and acquisitions in 2105, many technology-based companies were looking to either grow specific verticals and service segments or just consolidate resources in order to gain efficiencies. The level of competition in this industry is high and there is a lot of pressure to innovate in order for companies to survive in the marketplace.

As cyberattacks grow more and more sophisticated, IT security has become an arms race with businesses scrambling to keep up with the latest attack method. In a response to this trend, security providers are increasing the sophistication of their solutions, and in some cases acquiring other security specialist companies in order to expand their offering. The managed security sector will continue to see fast-paced growth, valued at $14.3B in 2014 with expected growth to $31.9B by 2019.

Similar to what we have seen with other cloud-based service providers, Unified Communications companies have been merging in an attempt to gain market share and become more competitive. This market will continue to evolve as technology changes, new applications emerge, and more enterprise companies invest in updating their communication capabilities in the coming years. We look forward to seeing the evolution and who comes out on top.

The cloud front has been active with mergers and acquisitions for the past few years, it’s no surprise that 2015 brought more consolidation to this marketplace. The highest price tag of the year was an acquisition for$67 billion, paid by Dell for EMC, including its VMware virtualization software.  Some analysts predict that the high valuations of technology companies seen in recent years will fade or even crash. We look forward to seeing how the cloud industry changes in the coming years.

The data center/colocation industry was not lacking for mergers and acquisitions activity in 2015.

Over the last few years big data, mobility, virtualization, and cloud computing have radically transformed enterprise IT. If you have started to think about your future IT planning, below are a few key data center trends to take note of for the coming year:

For those of you looking for a quick bite of IT industry news with your breakfast, here is what our IT Service Provider partners have been up to lately: