My 5 Take Aways - The Dallas Data Center Market

I visited yesterday with Tim Nicols (RagingWire - Vice President, Sales), Anthony Bolner (Stream Data Centers - Managing Director), and Curt Holcomb (Jones Lang LaSalle - Senior Vice President, led panel) regarding growth in the Dallas Data Center Market. The event was with Tech Titans and held at RagingWire's new Garland data center. Great conversation and great takeaways. Here were the five that stuck out to me the most from our discussion:

1. The Dallas market is positioned for long-term growth Dallas data center operators are betting on long term future demand. The large land site purchases made by providers like CyrusOne, Digital Realty, RagingWire, Skybox, and T5 Data Centers reveal this trend.
2. Healthy 25 MW of Dallas absorption for 1Q/2Q 2017 In data center markets like Northern Virginia, Chicago, and Silicon Valley, a majority of recent data center absorption is coming from hyper-scale cloud operators executing large colocation leases. While Dallas has yet to land one of these large transactions (10+ MW), the market's absorption is healthy. Most of the leasing activity comes from the financial, cloud, and technology industries.
3. Increasing importance on how companies interact with cloud This is clearly on the radar of Dallas data center users and operators. Understanding how to offer options/services (greater connectivity, managed services, internal/external cloud options) for data center users today, and in the future, will be key for future Dallas data center provider growth.
4. A Shift in Dallas Data Center Market Geographic Focus While the market is still active in areas like Richardson and Plano, cities like Allen, Garland, and the Fort Worth area known as Alliance (home of new Facebook campus/and the newly acquired QTS data center) definitely have caught the attention of data center users.
5. Many companies still operate their own data centers I often think the cloud growth and focus takes our eyes off the fact that many companies still own and operate their own IT infrastructure assets. Other panelists agreed and all still think there is an opportunity here.

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