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A recent survey from TCL Communications suggests that some telecommunications providers are investing in the development of large, campus-based data centers. They are reportedly spending hundreds of millions of dollars on such facilities, while a separate set of telecoms is reportedly investing in modular designs that are more flexible than traditional centers. It is the modular designs that appear to be taking over for the traditional campus model.

A report of the issue at CIOL identifies the "flexible data center" as having the ability to meet customer demand as it grows. Companies, therefore, are using initially smaller, modular designs to cater to their present volumes of clientele and, subsequently, are allowing themselves the ability to expand if their businesses surpass certain demand thresholds.

"The New Telco Data Center is above all now becoming a flexible Data Center," CIOL said, "with infrastructure used for internal networking, equipment, hosting, managed services and IT services as well as the traditional housing, colocation and IP connectivity services -- and able to cater for a range of services and customer needs."

Telecom providers are also reportedly offering more cloud services, as a group, than they once were. Of 57 telecoms involved in the TCL survey, 52 are offering customers cloud-based services such as server hosting, security applications, disaster recovery, and data backup services. Additionally, it is the availability of such cloud services that is driving telecoms to invest in modular data center designs.

TCL expects data center revenues to increase substantially over the next five years. From the end of 2014 to the end of 2019, the report speculates, revenue in the data center market will increase by 28 percent each year. Growth of that rate would result in the current global value of the market at $3.1 billion to reach $7.5 billion by 2019.