Data centre incumbents may not survive impending disruption from big cloud providers and Edward Snowden-inspired nationalism, Gartner has warned.

Traditional data centre providers’ futures are at risk from cloud players like Amazon and Google, the analyst house has predicted, adding that disruptive competition, economic warfare and even Snowden-inspired nationalism will transform the data centre market dramatically.

It predicts the effects will start being felt no later than early 2016, and analyst Joe Skorupa said elements of the four factors are already in play.

He added: "However, radical action by just one significant player could accelerate the market disruption of any of the factors."

Recent analyst house reports predicted healthy future growth for the data centre market, with Frost & Sullivan pegging the compound annual growth rate at 16% up to 2018 for Europe.

But Gartner claimed the future is less than rosy, after it labelled future IT spending "anaemic" back in June.

"Underneath this calm surface, increasing market pressures are driving a change in vendor behaviours, which, along with the four disruptive factors, make the market ripe for a period of major disruption," said Skorupa. "These behaviours will become more obvious as the pace of change increases."

The analyst firm believes incumbents will divide into three categories: those who aggressively defend their market share, disrupters who attack incumbents while protecting themselves against other new firms, and "Revolutionary Disrupters" that challenge the status quo.

Disruption

Gartner pointed to software-defined as one potential disruptive technology, as well as network function virtualisation and low-energy processors.

East vs West

Infrastructure providers divide into East/West camps, claimed Gartner, which said they also cannot peacefully co-exist.
With China’s deep resources, burgeoning brands and original equipment manufacturers, gartner believed the country will steal two percentage points off Western rivals by the end of 2017.

Cloud players

Meanwhile, it said traditional managed service providers are struggling to compete with cloud hosts like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, whose pricing wars have ensured low costs for firms hoping to throw their data somewhere cheap.

While workloads aren’t more efficient in the cloud, they are less expensive.

The Snowden effect

Snowden’s revelations about US Government spying have damaged trust in large multinational technology companies, according to Gartner.

With subsequent discoveries that US spying agency NSA is able to legally take customer data from large firms’ servers, people are turning to smaller companies instead, the analyst house said.

It predicts that Intel and ARM chip manufacturers will see their market strongholds in mobile and workload processors erode as firms go elsewhere.

"Software vendors will have to invest more to ensure their applications are compatible with a wider range of hardware, or pick and choose which hardware vendors to work with," Gartner said.