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Data Center Monitoring Market Size
While a direct answer to the size of the US Data Center Monitoring industry is not publicly available, from the existing public data we triangulate that the current size of the US Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) industry, which encompasses data center monitoring, is between $63.8 million and $264 million and, based on investment in the data monitoring segment, most likely towards the high end of that range.
RESEARCH STRATEGY, USEFUL DATA, AND TRIANGULATION
We initially attempted to locate a market report for the Data Center Monitoring market. While such reports are most often proprietary and expensive to obtain, the abstracts released for marketing purposes often contain useful details such as the market size and compound annual growth rate (CAGR). In this case, however, we ran into two problems: First, all the available reports focused on the global market. By itself, this isn't necessarily a problem, as knowing the global market size often gives us a baseline to triangulate the US market based on other known market factors. Which brings us to the second problem, namely, that all the public market report abstracts made a point of concealing the current market size and growth. (This abstract illustrates the problem.)
Therefore, we switched strategies. Our earlier research had uncovered a market report abstract that included a list of top players in this industry:
- Microsoft
- IBM
- Oracle
- Lenovo
- Opsview Ltd.
- Zoho Corp.
- Raritan Inc.
- Mindarray Systems
- SolarWinds
- Paessler AG
- Sunbird Inc.
- Corvil
As many of these are publicly-traded, we pulled several of their annual reports (e.g., Microsoft's 2018 Annual Report) and conducted quick searches to see if they tracked their data center monitoring as a separate segment. The answer in all cases was no; in fact, the term "data centers" appeared extremely rarely and never in conjunction with the word "monitoring."
For our third approach, we broadened our research to learn more about the data center industry in general. There is not always overlap between data centers and data center monitoring, as many of the monitoring solutions are inexpensive SaaS products; however, we judged it likely that if we could identify how much in-house monitoring cost as either a dollar amount or a percentage, the SaaS solutions might be worked out from there, likely being only a small segment of the total industry.
This avenue of research resulted in the following salient facts:
- The data center market for the Americas was $8.49 billion in 2017 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6%.
- The US market is 85% of the total Americas market, making it $7.21 billion (8.49 x 0.85) in 2017.
- The US market is expected to reach $10 billion in 2023 out of the $174 billion world market.
This means that the US has less than a 1/17th share, or 5.8% (10 / 174) of the global market while possessing only 4.7% of the world's population (327 million / 7,015 million). While this is a greater than average share, it does not accord with the US's 24.0% share of the world's GDP ($19.39 trillion / $80.68 trillion). Therefore, we hypothesize that the US market reflects data centers based in the US, not data centers in other countries with US customers. This means that a multinational company in the US renting server space in, for example, India to US-based clients may not be counted towards the US total market in this report if our hypothesis is correct.
As a final piece in the puzzle, our research also uncovered many articles discussing the rapidly-changing nature of and diversity in models for data centers. For example, an article in the Data Center Post identifies three (relevant) trends which are changing the face of data center monitoring and management:
Each of these requires different approaches to data center monitoring. For example, a company offering cloud services to its clients would require a monitoring solution, but this solution would very likely be developed in-house and offered as a value prop to prospective clients. Also, for smaller companies needing monitoring of their data centers, there is a fourth solution:
Between the diversity of possible data center monitoring solutions, the fact that many would be bundled with other products (e.g., a cloud or colocation server), and the problem of untangling which market a cross-national monitoring solution belongs to, it is no surprise that market reporting services do not wish to give away any of their information for free.
DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
However, there is a related industry which encompasses data center monitoring, including for the aforementioned data center solutions, data center infrastructure management, or DCIM. Based on the abstract of the global market report and some data points above, we can triangulate the US market as follows:
- The global market is expected to reach $2.85 billion by 2024 after growing at a CAGR of 21%.
- Calculating backward, this gives us an estimated 2019 market of $1.10 billion.
- As noted previously, the US has a 5.8% share in the world data center market and 24% of the world's GDP.
- Therefore, the US would have a DCIM market of between $63.8 million ($1.10 billion x 0.058) and $264 million ($1.10 billion x 0.24).
While either number is reasonable given the size of the US data center market given above, we found one more data point which makes it likely that the DCIM market is closer to the higher end of our range:
- In 2016, private equity firm Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) invested $120 million in LogicMonitor, a SaaS data center monitoring service.
It seems unlikely that PSG would consider this a good investment if the total market were towards the low end of our range. Therefore, we consider it likely that the US DCIM market, which encompasses the Data Center Monitoring market, is close to $264 million today.
FURTHER READING
If a more comprehensive answer is critical, any of the following reports should provide the needed clarity, though at a high price:
- Data Center Monitoring Systems(DCMS) 2019 — Global Market Growth, Opportunities and Analysis, Forecast To 2024
- Data Center Monitoring Solution Market 2019 — Global Trends, Market Share, Industry Size, Growth, Opportunities and Forecast to 2024
- Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Market — Size is Projected to be Around USD 2850 million By 2022