From colocation to collaboration. Partnerships as a growth driver in the data center ecosystem

Demand for data center services remains high: experts forecast significant market growth in the coming years. This is driven by many factors — increasing data volumes, the development of AI, as well as the trend toward import substitution of IT infrastructure, which encourages domestic businesses to invest in long-term solutions within Russia.

However, alongside this growth, the nature of that demand is also changing. Today, customers no longer choose just a “place to connect servers.” Clients don’t just need racks — they are looking for technology partners who can support their business in the long term and provide energy efficiency, connectivity, and rapid scalability. How can a data center organize its operations to meet the ever-increasing demands of clients?

In Russia, most IT companies focus on a comprehensive approach to service delivery. Their portfolios include everything from consulting to infrastructure services. Many data centers operate similarly: in addition to their core expertise — harware colocation — they offer clients cloud services, system integration, and hold their own telecommunications licenses or collaborate exclusively with selected operators. From a business perspective, this makes sense: more services mean more revenue. But for the customer, this approach carries certain risks.

Imagine the following scenario: you are a carrier hosting your infrastructure in a data center — and that same data center offers its own connectivity services to your potential customers. Or you are a cloud provider, while the data center where your servers are located launches its own cloud platform. The result is obvious: direct competition and a clear conflict of interest.

Vendor lock-in creates additional risks, including inflated pricing, limited scalability, and a lack of flexibility. Dependence on a single provider ties customers’ hands through rigid contracts and technical barriers that make rapid switching virtually impossible.

These risks are especially acute in the areas of cybersecurity and connectivity. When your infrastructure is hit by a large-scale DDoS attack and the only available protection provider fails to cope, there may simply be no time to search for an alternative. Today, redundancy of critical services and the ability to reroute traffic to channels with higher-capacity uplinks are no longer optional — they are a hard requirement. Yet this level of resilience can only be achieved if customers have access to multiple providers within the same data center facility.

IXcellerate, one of the first data center providers, has found a way to avoid these risks. From its foundation, the company has remained neutral — independent from any single carrier — and has focused its efforts on its core business: colocation. All other services, including telecommunications and cloud offerings, application deployment, as well as the supply of server and network equipment, are delivered through partners.

• Customers:
  Network neutrality ensures freedom of choice when it comes to providers and technology solutions. The broader the partner ecosystem, the more options customers have — allowing them to evaluate suppliers against multiple criteria, select the most suitable ones, and ultimately reduce costs. At the same time, competition shifts away from the “data center vs. customer” dynamic and moves to the partner level. Healthy competition within the ecosystem drives higher service quality and more competitive pricing.
• Data Centers:
  By delegating non-core services to trusted partners, a data center operator can focus on continuously improving its core offering — designing and operating resilient infrastructure, ensuring power supply, cooling, physical security, and monitoring to maintain data center reliability at the Tier III level.
• Partners:
  Telecom operators, cloud providers, system integrators, and other technology vendors gain the opportunity to monetize their expertise without the capital expenditure required to build their own data centers. At the same time, they can offer services to customers who already trust the chosen facility and can seamlessly integrate additional services as their needs evolve.

IXcellerate partner program is built around the principle of mutual benefit. When data center customers require additional services — such as cybersecurity and DDoS protection, cloud solutions, or dedicated connectivity — IXcellerate lists trusted partners whose services are available on premise. For example, every company hosting equipment across IXcellerate campuses can establish connectivity through any of the 50 carriers present at the Telehouse. Customers can also order “Cyberattack and DDoS Protection” services from multiple providers. Redundancy across two or more suppliers significantly increases infrastructure resilience and strengthens the overall security posture.

Ecosystem participants also act as referral partners, helping to attract new customers to the data center. IXcellerate enables trusted partners to promote its colocation services directly. As a result, enterprise clients of telecom operators can plan comprehensive digital transformation initiatives, deploy and scale their infrastructure, and rely on highly resilient Tier III–level data centers to support long-term growth.

Regardless of the point of sale, every data center customer receives a contract with a unified service level and guaranteed availability, including full redundancy of all critical components. IXcellerate has developed and consistently applies strict service standards across its operations.

For example, as a result of ecosystem integration, all bare metal service requests — dedicated physical servers without virtualization or per-unit colocation with internet access — are now processed within three business hours instead of the previous nine. These operational improvements have delivered tangible results: revenue in the bare metal segment increased more than fourfold over a twelve-month period.

Once again, all parties benefit. The data center strengthens its market appeal and customer focus, clients gain a predictable and transparent service experience, and partners receive additional revenue opportunities, a structured go-to-market channel, streamlined processes, and access to a proven, high-reliability infrastructure.

Today, IXcellerate works with more than 50 trusted partners, each of whom has undergone a rigorous selection and onboarding process. Across all key service areas — connectivity, peering, cyberattack protection, bare metal servers, and cloud solutions — customers can choose the provider that best matches their specific requirements. In this way, the company not only delivers highly resilient IT infrastructure for equipment hosting, but also operates as a platform for the development of alternative and value-added services.

Demand for these services continues to grow, and the ecosystem is steadily expanding. Over the next five years, IXcellerate plans to onboard providers of specialized solutions, including enterprise-grade backup systems, infrastructure monitoring tools, advanced cybersecurity services, and more. The next milestone will be the launch of a partner services marketplace, enabling online ordering and automated service activation.

The IXcellerate example demonstrates that a well-designed partnership strategy can do more than meet the evolving needs of customers — it can create growth opportunities for all participants. For the industry as a whole, this represents a new standard of collaboration based on openness, fair competition, and customer-centricity. A standard in which the data center does not compete with its own customers, but instead creates the conditions for their growth.