The report, The Big UK Data Equipment Opportunity, highlights UK capabilities and key players within this important growth area, with a focus specifically on the financial sector.
The past decade has seen a move from the physical trading floor to the anonymous data centre, populated with generic imported equipment. The next decade will see these systems optimised for the unique requirements of a data centre. This presents a major opportunity for the UK to supply latency and security-optimised hardware to the local financial services sector – something that may become even more important for London and the competitiveness of its financial sector in this period of political uncertainty.
Optical communications offer a significant improvement in energy performance and data transfer speed within and outside data centres – and specialised data centre are driven by security or speed of data access need components that will support those characteristics. This is particularly important to the finance sector, especially for high speed trading.
Data centres are the next big market opportunity for optical communications firms, and the UK has many of the key elements necessary to be a key global player in the DC equipment market — major end users, a strong research base, a billion-pound specialist local market, core supplier capability and capacity for substantial supplier growth. However, the market has failed to generate the necessary links between these core elements to create a market-driven development and uptake of UK technology.
