Never before we have seen such an intensity between colo providers. The acquisition of TelecityGroup by Equinix took the M&As in the industry up a level.

The $3.5 billion buyout stifled the original announcement in February that TelecityGroup would be merging with Interxion in a deal worth $2.2 billion.

With this latest acquisition, Equinix secured its place as the top colo provider in the EMEA with 14% of the market share in the region.

Rob Elder, Director at Keysource, said: "The data centre market is becoming increasingly competitive and this is driving consolidation as organisations look to realise the benefits of scale."

"Looking forward I believe this will continue with more mergers and acquisitions involving smaller, regional players being taken over by the more established businesses. These will attract a premium if they have long term, blue chip clients and/or a differentiated service offering."

This year alone, investments around data centres is beating records with nearly $60 billion having been spent on investments related to the data centre space.

As storage providers need more space, impacted by the ever growing of IoT connected devices and services, future expenditures are certainly going to happen.

Data centre related M&As

Mr Elder added: "There is also a high barrier to entry to the sector due to cost, so for many the decision to merge with or acquire a business with existing infrastructure and revenue is appealing."

The collocation market is still very much fragmented in Europe and doors are open to further M&As.

With TelecityGroup now part of its portfolio, Equinix has a launch pad for future growth in countries like Poland, Bulgaria and Turkey.

The company will also be looking at expanding its presence in key markets like Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Finland.

Interxion as it recovers the ‘data centre saga’ with TelecityGroup and Equinix, will "continue to execute our communities of interest strategy with a disciplined investment approach focused on delivering strong returns" said its CEO.

Mr Elder said: "We may also see more foreign investment in the sector as international players look to enter developed markets as was the case with the NTT acquisition of Gyron.

"Equally, established operators will be looking to higher growth markets which will drive them to focus not just on mature but developing markets such as APAC."

The data centre market as a whole has awakened to the demand fostered by enterprise demand, big data and new drivers such as IoT.

Across the world colo providers and web scale companies (like Google, Apple and Microsoft), are investing billions to build new facilities and acquire existing ones to expand their cloud and data centre services.

As for IoT and M2M, according to Cisco by 2018 data centres will have to have enough storage space for 8.6ZBs of data up from 3.1ZBs in 2013.