Quick takeaways from infra / STRUCTURE in Toronto, September 14-15, 2022
We held the infra / STRUCTURE summit in Toronto last week and want to thank everybody involved that made it a huge success.
We of course would like to thank our sponsors, who helped make everything possible. But we also want to just thank everyone for taking the time and effort to travel during a time of relative unpredictability. It is a busy time of year and we appreciate you making us a priority.
The two-day summit saw a barrage of presentations and panels, but some themes definitely stood out. The sector continues to move along a steady trajectory, but the first half of the year has been bumpy as macroeconomic conditions have been sluggish and issues like supply chains continue to persist. Despite the challenges, there are plenty of accelerating trends across the industry that are favourable. Outsourcing and enterprise uptake is pushing forward, existing customer growth is healthy and churn rates remain low, while scale effects continue to drive bottom line stability for the full spectrum of providers – from hyperscale to subscale and traditional managed infrastructure.
The self-build continues to be a topic of debate. Will it stop the gravy train or is it representative of just another shift in the dynamics of hyperscale data centre expansion? Coming out of the summit, it seems like the latter view has prevailed, but things are certainly far from settled.
Other areas that were highlighted include the continued rise of managed public cloud, the coming decentralization of connectivity hubs and overflow scenarios that are emerging across the world. The latter is pushing new hyperscale data centre development paradigms and we touched on a few of the new models currently being built.
After some internal consideration, we are planning to bring infra / STRUCTURE back to Toronto in 2023. We will have more details and information in the coming months as we continue to explore the most pressing questions about the future growth of the wider infrastructure services ecosystem.
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