The Hottest Data Center Companies In 2020: CRN's Data Center 50

CRN breaks down the 50 data center vendors that are leading the industry in 2020.

The data center landscape is changing significantly.

Private equity firms are now leading the data center M&A charge. Companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are spending billions each quarter building new centers across the globe. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and automation are becoming key ingredients in most data center products.

And the public cloud market leaders are now jumping into the on-premises space.

This year marks a pivotal time for the data center market as customers seek hybrid IT and multi-cloud solutions. Market leaders are innovating at a rapid pace from power and cooling technology to networking and hyperconverged infrastructure, while colocation providers are now focused on building massive hyperscale facilities.

CRN breaks down the 50 data center vendors that are leading the industry in 2020.

128 Technology

Andy Ory, CEO

Headquarters: Burlington, Mass.

The networking software startup is on a mission to reinvent the network based on a new model for virtual networking with Session Smart, which enables the creation of a service-centric fabric that drives better ROI and performance. 128 Technology recently captured $30 million in new funding while also hiring channel veteran Mark Vella to grow its partner base.

AMD

Lisa Su, President, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

AMD has been driving high-performance innovation for more than 50 years inside the data center. The chipmaker closed 2019 with over 50 percent year-over-year growth thanks to strong sales of the company’s new 7-nanometer Ryzen, Radeon and EPYC Rome products. AMD recently hired former IBM Power leader Joshua Friedrich to work on CPU-GPU integration in the data center.

Amazon Web Services

Andy Jassy, CEO

Headquarters: Seattle

AWS made its biggest data center market splash in December by making AWS Outposts generally available. The public cloud titan’s on-premises version of AWS includes a server rack along with EC2 instances, EBS block storage and two hosted container services. Amazon has also been spending billions every year on building and equipping new data centers on a global basis.

APC By Schneider Electric

Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: West Kingston, R.I.

One of the largest providers of data center power and cooling offerings, APC by Schneider Electric has been innovating on the software and services front. The nearly $30 billion company provides offerings such as cloud-enabled UPS with Connected Smart-UPS that includes remote monitoring and its SaaS-based data center management platform EcoStruxure IT for Partners.

Apstra

David Cheriton, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.

A pioneer in intent-based networking, the startup automates the design, build, deployment and operations of data center networks through its distributed system architecture and vendor-agnostic overlay. Apstra recently hired Extreme Networks co-founder Herb Schneider to lead all engineering efforts as well as NetScout’s former channel sales leader, Jeff Jones.

Arista Networks

Jayshree Ullal, President, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

The longtime data center networking specialist made its biggest acquisition in years with the purchase of Big Switch Networks, known for its next-generation data center switching fabric Big Cloud Fabric. Arista Networks will leverage Big Switch to enrich its analytics, visibility and automation technology to help customers monitor their cloud networks.

Broadcom

Hock Tam, President, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

The semiconductor and infrastructure company provides a slew of switches, Ethernet and storage adapters, controllers and custom silicon in the data center as well as a new Wi-Fi 6 portfolio. In November, Broadcom closed its $10.7 billion blockbuster purchase of cybersecurity leader Symantec’s Enterprise business.

Cato Networks

Shlomo Kramer, Co-Founder, CEO

Headquarters: Alpharetta, Ga.

Cato Networks connects remote offices, mobile users, data centers and cloud resources into a secure and optimized globally managed software-defined WAN. The company, led by Shlomo Kramer—who previously co-founded Check Point Software Technologies and Imperva—recently launched its first global channel partner program.

CloudGenix

Kumar Ramachandran, Founder, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Kumar Ramachandran told CRN that 2020 is the breakout year for the SD-WAN superstar as CloudGenix raised $65 million in funding with plans to launch a revamped partner program in March. CloudGenix’s Autonomous SD-WAN provides application policies aligned to business intent along with access to multi-cloud and DevOps frameworks.

Cisco Systems

Chuck Robbins, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

The worldwide networking leader has been a staple in the data center space for decades by providing switches, servers, security and hyperconverged infrastructure to its legions of customers. In December, Cisco entered the data center silicon market with the launch of Cisco Silicon One, its own programable ASIC for high-performance networking.

Citrix Systems

David Henshall, President, CEO

Headquarters: Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Citrix provides an array of data center offerings including SD-WAN, traffic management, application delivery management, analytics to boost performance and its own hypervisor. The company recently hired former SAP executive Bronwyn Hastings to lead its worldwide channel sales and ecosystem.

CoolIT Systems

Peter Calverley, CEO

Headquarters: Calgary, Alberta; Stamford, Conn.

A longtime innovator in the cooling systems that keep data centers functioning, CoolIT Systems provides liquid cooling solutions for servers and processors from Nvidia, Intel and AMD. The company’s rack-based Direct Liquid Cooling technology enables increases in rack densities, component performance and power efficiencies.

Clumio

Poojan Kumar, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Clumio launched out of stealth in 2019 with its flagship backup Software-as-a-Service system led by a group of veteran engineers hailing from Oracle, Nutanix and VMware backed by Silicon Valley investors. Clumio recently raised $135 million in funding that will go toward channel expansion, including its inaugural partner program that will launch this year.

Cumulus Networks

Josh Leslie, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Cumulus Networks specializes in building efficient data center networks using open software that runs on Linux. The company said its Cumulus Linux operating system is the most efficient and affordable way to operate data centers, which is combined with its NetQ management tool to provide advanced telemetry and analytics.

CyrusOne

Tesh Durvasula, Interim President, CEO

Headquarters: Dallas

CyrusOne operates nearly 50 data centers across the U.S., Europe and Asia, and is currently constructing a massive data center in Silicon Valley. The data center colocation specialist named Tesh Durvasula as its interim president and CEO after Gary Wojtaszek announced his resignation in February after nine years of running the company.

Dell Technologies

Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Round Rock, Texas

Dell Technologies is the largest data center infrastructure provider in the world with a market-leading portfolio of storage, servers and hyperconverged offerings. One area Dell is investing heavily in this year is data centers at the edge, with the launch of purpose-built servers, streaming analytics and enclosures.

Docker

Scott Johnston, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

After going through four different CEOs over the past three years, Docker picked Chief Product Officer Scott Johnston to take the reins of the company in November. The container superstar provides its Containers as-a-Service platform, Docker Datacenter, to enable the building and management of any application anywhere.

Digital Realty

William Stein, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

The colocation behemoth is one of the largest data center operators in the world with more than 210 facilities in 15 countries. Digital Realty generated $3.2 billion in revenue last year with plans to close its blockbuster $8.4 billion acquisition of InterXion in March to expand the company’s footprint in Europe.

Eaton

Craig Arnold, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland

The $21.4 billion data center intelligent power management specialist provides an array of offerings from blade UPSes, rack power distribution units and preconfigured enclosures to remote monitoring services and energy saver systems, along with a focus on enabling the Internet of Things. Eaton has shifted its channel program to stress partner certifications over revenue thresholds.

Equinix

Charles Meyers, President, CEO

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

The data center colocation and services giant has been significantly expanding its global footprint over the past two years with now more than 200 centers worldwide. Equinix is diving deeper into the edge market this year through its acquisition of bare-metal automation startup Packet to help customers rapidly deploy digital infrastructure.

Extreme Networks

Ed Meyercord, President, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Extreme Networks’ Data Center portfolio provides a wide range of networking, analytics, programmable ASICs, open APIs and automation managed through a single pane of glass. The company acquired networking competitor Aerohive Networks last year for $210 million to strengthen its cloud management, SD-WAN and edge capabilities.

Flexential

Chris Downie, CEO

Headquarters: Charlotte, N.C.; Denver

The colocation and cloud computing data center specialist has 40 facilities in nearly all of the major U.S. markets with a focus on professional services and hybrid IT. Flexential was created in 2018 as a result of Peak 10’s $1.7 billion acquisition of ViaWest.

Fujitsu

Tatsuya Tanaka, President

Headquarters: Tokyo

Japan’s leading communications company offers a full range of data center products in more than 100 countries from servers and storage to networking platforms and converged architectures targeting 5G. Fujitsu has created Fujitsu Americas to focus on driving greater sales traction outside Japan.

Google

Sundar Pichai, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Google Cloud Platform offers data center networking, block and object storage infrastructure as well as OS-level security, while Google’s Anthos software builds and manages container-based applications that run in data centers. The search giant is spending billions each year on building and equipping new hyperscale data centers across the globe.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Antonio Neri, President, CEO

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise owns a powerful data center infrastructure that includes servers, storage, automation, security, hybrid cloud, hyperconverged and network switches. HPE’s popular GreenLake consumption-based, pay-as-you-go offering delivers data center solutions with on-demand capacity with the economics of public cloud.

Hitachi Vantara

Toshiaki Tokunaga, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

The company’s Smart Data Center combines advanced data center analytics, artificial intelligence and automation alongside its storage or hyperconverged infrastructure. Japanese conglomerate Hitachi completed the merger between Hitachi Vantara and Hitachi Consulting to combine the company’s consulting-led organization with Hitachi Vantara’s focus on data center, data operations and digital transformation.

IBM

Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President, CEO

Headquarters: Armonk, N.Y.

IBM provides an array of services including data center design, Kubernetes, cabling and connectivity, application migration, operations management and managed services as well as Watson AI. In addition to its compute, network and storage products, the company provides a unique high-performance computing Platform as a Service with built-in automation running on the IBM Cloud. IBM has named Arvind Krishna to be its new CEO, effective April 6.

Intel

Bob Swan, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

The data center processor and 5G chip star focuses on application acceleration, performance efficiency, data-heavy workloads, flash memory and big data analytics. Intel’s Data Center Manage software collects and analyzes the power, health and thermals of devices in the data center with real-time monitoring and analytics.

Inspur

Peter Sun Pishu, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Jinan, China

The data center infrastructure provider offers everything from servers and high-performance compute platforms to cloud data center management and desktop virtualization software. Inspur is currently the fastest-growing server vendor in the world with a strong innovation focus on its InCloud OpenStack data center operating system.

Juniper Networks

Rami Rahim, CEO

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Juniper Networks is a longtime data center networking standout with top-notch routers, switches and automation software as well as an expanding security portfolio. Juniper’s Contrail Insights simplifies multi-cloud operations with monitoring, troubleshooting and optimizing functions based on telemetry, policy rules and artificial intelligence.

Lenovo

Yang Yuanqing, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Hong Kong

The longtime data center provider sells its software-defined infrastructure, servers, storage, networking, network virtualization and software to centers around the world. Lenovo recently hired channel veteran Pete Koliopoulous to boost global partner sales and help drive synergies between Lenovo’s Data Center and Intelligent Devices groups.

LogicMonitor

Kevin McGibben, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Barbara, Calif.

LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based performance monitoring platform provides visibility into everything inside a data center while automatically correlating data to solve business concerns. The company recently acquired Swedish AI and machine-learning specialist Unomaly to boost its DevOps capabilities.

Microsoft

Satya Nadella, CEO

Headquarters: Redmond, Wash.

Microsoft provides its Azure SQL Database, backup, networking software, machine learning, analytics and developer tools as well as services around applications and Kubernetes for data centers. Microsoft is spending billions on building new Azure data center regions across the world at a rapid rate to meet its public cloud demand.

NetApp

George Kurian, CEO, President

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

The storage and data services specialist provides everything from hyperconverged and all-flash array infrastructure to workload automation and data backup and recovery offerings for the data center. NetApp recently introduced its Keystone cloud consumption model that simplifies the acquisition and management of data for on-premises data centers or in the cloud.

Nutanix

Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

The hyperconverged infrastructure pioneer has transitioned into a software and subscription innovator focused on application optimization. Nutanix provides a slew of data center software and services including Calm for app-centric life-cycle management and cloud orchestration, Prism Pro for predictive analytics, and its edge platform Xi IoT.

Nvidia

Jensen Huang, Founder, President, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

The innovative chipmaker’s Nvidia Volta AI-based computing platform gives data centers the power to accelerate machine learning and high-performance computing workloads. Nvidia provides GPU virtualization and cloud computing as well as its vComputeServer, which streamlines the deployment and management of GPU servers.

Oracle

Safra Catz, CEO

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Oracle builds, operates and provides data centers services worldwide with a focus on full integrated stacks of cloud applications and platform solutions. The company is currently undertaking its biggest data center expansion effort in its history with the goal of building 20 new data centers worldwide by the end of 2020.

Palo Alto Networks

Nikesh Arora, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

The security star provides a range of products targeting the data center including data protection, automated threat discovery, firewalls and threat prevention and response. Last year, Palo Alto Networks acquired serverless security startup PureSec, container security startup Twistlock, and IoT startup Zingbox.

Pivot3

Bill Stover, CEO

Headquarters: Austin, Texas

The hyperconverged infrastructure and video surveillance provider’s Acuity Datacenter series is powered by NVMe flash and optimized by Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine, which automates data and workload mobility and disaster recovery operations. Pivot3’s former chief financial officer, Bill Stover, took the CEO reins in July.

Scale Computing

Jeff Ready, CEO

Headquarters: Indianapolis

Scale Computing’s HC3 hyperconverged software eliminates the need for traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery and shared storage with a fully integrated system for running applications. The company is investing heavily in edge computing, recently condensing its full HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure and virtualization software into a small-device RAM footprint.

Stack Infrastructure

Brian Cox, CEO

Headquarters: Denver

The fast-growing wholesale data center colocation provider has raised more than $1 billion since being formed in 2019 with expansion plans set throughout 2020. Stack Infrastructure was created by investor IPI Data Center Partners after it combined assets acquired from T5 Data Centers and Infomart Data Centers.

SolarWinds

Kevin Thompson, President, CEO

Headquarters: Austin, Texas

The end-to-end data center monitoring and management standout provides visibility around network performance, storage, computing, configuration and applications. In 2019, SolarWinds acquired SaaS-based database performance management company VividCortex, security management firm Passportal and cloud-based service desk software provider Samanage.

Supermicro

Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman, President, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Supermicro provides an array of data center products from high-density servers and all-flash storage arrays to chassis and power supplies. With a focus on high-performance computing, Supermicro’s next- generation X11 Data Center Optimized SuperServer line is purpose-built to deliver the best performance-per-watt and per-dollar in the industry.

TierPoint

Jerry Kent, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: St. Louis

TierPoint operates more than 40 data centers in 20 U.S. markets, providing colocation, hosting, network services, cloud computing and disaster recovery. TierPoint is led by longtime IT executive and entrepreneur Jerry Kent, who co-founded Charter Communications and was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 2012.

Tripp Lite

Glen Haeflinger, President

Headquarters: Chicago

The data center power specialist’s long list of products includes UPS systems, power distribution units, micro data centers, power inverters, cables and adapters, network switches as well as rack and cooling equipment. Tripp Lite recently launched the SmartRack Aisle Containment System, which improves temperature control and equipment performance.

Vertiv

Rob Johnson, CEO

Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio

Vertiv entered the public market in February on the New York Stock Exchange after the company’s recent merger with GS Acquisition Holdings. The $4.3 billion company provides UPSes, thermal management, static transfer switches, racks and enclosures, along with a long list of data center services.

Veeam

William Largent, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Baar, Switzerland

Veeam is a software leader for backup and recovery, data protection and advanced monitoring in the data center. The company is set to be acquired by private equity firm Insight Partners for $5 billion, which will see its co-founders, CEO Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev, exit the company.

VMware

Pat Gelsinger, CEO

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

The data center virtualization pioneer has been extending its software prowess into Kubernetes, security and hybrid cloud over the past several years, while consistently enhancing vSphere, NSX and VxRail. VMware has spent billions on acquisitions over the past 14 months including Carbon Black, Pivotal Software, Avi Networks and Bitnami, to name a few.

Wasabi Technologies

David Friend, Co-Founder, President, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

The cloud storage startup, founded by former Carbonite CEO David Friend, allows customers to store infinite amounts of data with no data egress charges or API fees. Last year, the company launched its first partner program as well as a new data center in Virginia.

Western Digital

David Goeckeler, CEO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Western Digital provides data center object storage, solid and hard disk drives, as well as servers and its OpenFlex composable infrastructure. In September, the company acquired NVMe-over-Fabric and ASICs startup Kazan Networks. David Goeckeler was named the company's new CEO in March.