The move to cloud architecture will reach a significant tipping point in the next three years as Credit Suisse analysts estimate that 90% of all enterprise workloads will take place within public or private clouds by 2021.

“Even though 90% for companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google seems like a lot,” Sami Badri, senior equity analyst at Credit Suisse, told Data Economy in a video interview. “I would say that the data growth itself is actually quite significant, so there will be more than enough business to go around specifically in the multi-tenant data centers and cloud-service provider side.”

Badri expects the cloud-service provider market to more than double to $80 billion over the same period with the variety of “as a service” vendors representing two-thirds of the market while multi-tenancy data centers make up the remaining third of the market.

“Over the next three years, you are going to see a large amount of industry consolidation, more strategic partnerships formed with more software-defined networking offerings, and, more importantly, enterprises finally moving the majority of their workloads from in-house architecture to finally cloud-grade architectures,” he added.

The biggest winners likely will be the dominant North American players, such as Equinix and Digital Realty.

However, Badri also sees China-based GDS emerging on the global stage.

“It is backed by a function of multiple Chinese hyperscalers and enterprise data centers,” he noted during the interview. “Over time, you will see other big players emerge. However, for the next two years, Equinix and Digital Realty will dominate the narrative. It is just a matter of time before the third biggest player is formed, which I think is a very eminent development.”

One potential candidate is US-based CyrusOne, which announced its acquisition of European data-center operator Zenium at the end of 2017 and has obtained a strategic investment from GDS.

“When a mid-cap player like Cyrus-One decides to cross markets and enter the European market with its Zenium acquisition, I think they are starting to show signs of them becoming very major players, especially internationally,” he added.