Commenting on the new report, Mark Larard, director in Jones Lang LaSalle’s Data Centre team, said: “The majority of our survey respondents hold an increasingly positive attitude towards industry prospects for the remainder of 2010 and into the first half of 2011, and over the last couple of months we have seen a number of significant transactions occur, demonstrating that previous optimism is now being converted into hard fact.”
Larard continued: “2010 has not been good news for all data centre developers however, and the survey indicates that the availability of debt finance has not noticeably eased. No new developments sites have started as yet during 2010, and indeed a couple of high profile potential sites appear to have taken a considerable step back in their plans to start speculative development. However, those sites which were already underway last year, all continue to progress and flourish. Clearly the ability to go and 'kick the tyres' is a considerable advantage when responding to an RFI, and those developments which are already underway and have a degree of certainty in their delivery timescales have dominated the market thus far this year.”
Jones Lang LaSalle’s Data Centre Barometer 4 also highlights that at this stage of the business cycle, developers are preparing their position for the future; Carriers, integrators and co-locators (the "third party providers") are acquiring, accounting for the lion's share of wholesale take-up, ready for the outsourced market to pick up. Mark added: “Only the corporate sector appears to not have reacted, although it is noticeable that there are one or two banks currently considering a venture into the market, but only in a relatively small way. Are corporate occupiers still constrained by CAPEX or are they simply not generating the same level of data for storage?
The answer is both. Technology is allowing organisations to make do with what they currently have, for longer, with smaller sums of capital expenditure. In addition, corporate decision makers are now much more likely to accept using an integrator or co-locator as a semi-permanent solution, shifting the emphasis away from the corporate sector, to third party providers. In effect this is a re-allocation of take-up, and a subtle shift in risk responsibility of data centre management.”
Larard concluded: “Developers and third party providers are now beginning to prepare for the future, and as indicated by Data Centre Barometer 4, their timing might well be spot on!”