THE CLIENT
An Asian-based PE firm
451 Research, the technology arm of S&P Global Market Intelligence, estimates that the compound annual growth rate of datacenter capacity globally to be 9% from 2021-2027. A majority of this development will be built to continue servicing public cloud providers, as companies leverage hybrid infrastructure with assets in the public cloud, along with hosted applications in both company-owned datacenters and third-party colocation facilities. Given the rapid digital transformation of the global economy, PE funds are increasingly targeting the datacenter industry as an investment segment because it offers steady and consistent growth.
USERS
Investment management team
This Asian-based PE firm focuses on a vast array of real estate markets that include residential development, commercial offices, retail malls, logistics warehouses and more. The investment management team had been following the growth of the datacenter market in Asia Pacific and wanted to capitalize on this opportunity. This required access to high-quality data to help identify and assess potential targets.
Pain Points
The investment management team lacked access to detailed and reliable information on the datacenter market. In particular, they wanted to:
- Size demand for datacenter services, understand the opportunities, challenges and pinpoint market drivers of future supply and demand.
- Understand the key providers in the market and their growth potential.
- Also understand the key buyers and their technology choices, adoption trends and spending priorities.
- Monitor innovations across technology sectors, including cloud and managed services, datacenters and applied infrastructure.
- Gain insights on technology deal trends.
Members of the investment management team had listened to a presentation by 451 Research from an online thought leadership event and knew that the group analyzes the technologies, services and companies that disrupt and evolve information technology. They reached out to hear more about the services that 451 Research offers.
"The investment management team had been tracking the growth of the datacenter market and wanted to dig deeper into potential opportunities to identify possible acquisition candidates."
The Solution
Specialists from 451 Research discussed how the investment management team could assess the technology landscape, understand challenges and opportunities, and source deals creatively using a variety of differentiated solutions. The specialists described a number of capabilities that would enable the team to:
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Identify disruptive technologies |
451 Research’s Market Monitor & Forecast products provide a thorough competitive analysis of specific markets, including vendor and product/service identification at an aggregate market and subsector level. Built on a bottom-up |
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Monitor the pulse of the industry |
Market Insight is a daily report on the key developments impacting the players, trends and technologies across the entire enterprise IT landscape. Technology & Business Insight reports are designed to complement Market Insights with market data, analysis of customer adoption rates and perspectives on market dynamics. |
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Assess the supply and capabilities of datacenter facilities |
The Datacenter KnowledgeBase is a global [1] Data as of January 2022. |
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Understand customer dynamics |
Voice of the Enterprise provides accurate, consistent and granular survey insights needed to calibrate product, marketing, sales and investment strategies to address: – Real enterprise customer sentiment – Demand and plans around technology adoption – Spending and budget changes and influencers – Vendor perceptions – IT pain points and challenges – IT priorities and project drivers |
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Have a view into M&A activity |
The M&A KnowledgeBase is a global online database of 70,000+ technology M&A transactions. Subscribers gain unique value from proprietary insight on undisclosed private- |
Key Benefits
Members of the investment management team thought that the 451 specialists had a solid grasp on all aspects of the IT landscape and could provide the valuable insights needed to successfully identify and vet potential acquisition targets in the datacenter space. They subscribed to the 451 Research datasets and had several training sessions on how to efficiently use the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform for data access and valuation modeling. Today, they are benefiting from having:
- A comprehensive picture of datacenter facilities and locations to understand the market landscape.
- More clarity about addressable demand by location to evaluate market dynamics.
- Details on technology deal trends, comparables and proprietary 451 estimates, valuable as a benchmark when assessing investments.
- Ongoing market monitoring to gain deep insights into the risks and opportunities presented by disruptive technologies and new market participants.
- An understanding of the needs of different target audiences to assess future sales opportunities.