Datacloud Awards

Cloud Service Innovator of the Year

This award honours the achievements of the leading innovator in the highly competitive Cloud Services sector during the previous 12 months.

The solution provider could be a public cloud provider, datacentre, telco, colocation operator, or creator of cloud operational tools, enabling high-volume, elastic public or hybrid cloud solutions with high reliability, sustainability and security. Whether servicing a mass market for tens of thousands of virtual private clouds users, virtual machine, container or micro-services based, or enabling enterprise operations for complex, or AI workloads in hybrid, public cloud or across multiple cloud platforms - the winner must demonstrate proven reliability and competitive performance.

Edge Impact Award

This award is for innovation in delivering superior user experience for edge data centres or any kind of initiatives or federations such as AI using edge data centres, creating an impact locally. All entries need to provide evidence (e.g. customer or partner testimonials) and quantifiable facts (e.g. numbers or other metrics) to support their submissions.

The winner could be an Internet service provider, a Managed Security provider, an Internet Exchange provider, Hyperscaler or a Data Centre operator with a clear delivery focus to create impact on the Edge.

Data Centre Vendor of the Year

This award recognises the achievements of a vendor in the highly competitive cloud and data centre market over the past 12 months, which has significantly supported customers and advanced the entire market through its customer proximity and innovative strength. This is not about the products itself, but about the impact of results, attitude and the strength of vision. The focus is on the ability to execute collaborative efforts and the company's own research and development activities, which are valued by customers.

The applicant could be any vendor that receives the high recognition from the market for being operational and an enabler during the past 12 months. The winner must demonstrate proven reliability and competitive performance.

Please note that the Datacloud Awards will not endorse or promote specific products, services or platforms, nor advise users to select one.

Best AI Innovation

AI is vastly changing data centre design, as facilities are evolving to accommodate the processing power from increasing AI workloads. AI supports data processing and storage for data centres in many ways. The technology can continuously monitor system parameters and adjust them to optimise processing performance, which ensures that processing tasks are executed efficiently.

This award has been created to recognise the best innovative use of AI in the data centre industry, not only pushing the boundaries in artificial intelligence technology, but also as a reference for the industry to scale AI accelerated future of data centres.

Best IX Innovation

This award will recognise the best internet exchange provider of the past year. This can be related to service excellence, technical or organisational innovation, business transformation, or anything else – either general or related to specific projects.

Best Data Centre Software or Solution Provider of Year

Software-defined data centres are data centres that extend virtualisation concepts such as abstraction, pooling and automation to all data centre resources and services. This is done to achieve IT as a service (ITaaS).

The award in this category will highlight the most significant deployments, innovations, projects, service improvements or initiatives in data centre technology.

Best Data Centre in Asia Pacific Award

Awarded for excellence in providing regional data centre services in Asia Pacific. This award is eligible to any company with a facility in Asia Pacific.

Best Data Centre in Europe Award

Awarded for excellence in providing regional data centre services in Europe. This award is eligible to any company with a facility in Europe.

Best Data Centre in Middle East & Africa

Awarded for excellence in providing regional data centre services in Middle East & Africa. This award is eligible to any company with a facility in Middle East & Africa.

Best Data Centre in Americas Award

Awarded for excellence in providing regional data centre services in the Americas. This award is eligible to any company with a facility in the Americas.

Best Global Data Centre of the Year – Global Providers

This awarded is for excellence in providing colocation, or/and hyperscale cloud services across multiple regions to achieve resiliency, performance, sustainability impacts with high customer satisfaction.

Note to entrants: To be eligible you must operate colocation facilities in at least two of the following regions: Asia Pacific; Europe; Middle East & Africa; The Americas, if not in all.

Best Data Centre Sales Team

This award will recognise the most outstanding sales team in the data centre industry. Judges are looking for evidence of commercial success, fantastic relationship-building, and business development.

The award recognises a winning team that will be awarded for its excellence and determination to deliver outstanding results.

Best Marketing or Social Media Campaign

This award recognises marketing excellence in digital infrastructure and communication – it can be a well-executed campaign, an outstanding marketing operation, a digital sales success story, a viral social media campaign or a combination of any of the above. Campaigns on any media, in any language, and from anywhere in the world are eligible for submission.

The award recognises a winning team that will be awarded for its excellence and determination to deliver outstanding results.

Data Centre Innovative Energy Solution Award 

This award relates to innovation in energy sourcing and supply, rather than energy stewardship within the data centre environment. The way that data centres source low carbon and renewable energy is under intense scrutiny from regulators, media, NGOs and customers. Although the majority of electricity purchased by the sector is already certified renewable, operators and providers are leading the way in solutions that do not consume existing low carbon supply. Some are exploring on-site clean energy generation solutions like fuel cells, hydrogen and energy storage; others are creating additional utility scale renewable generation; with these solutions providing potential to be autonomous from utility supply or even to contribute to the utility grid through export and, in so doing transforming and igniting a collaborative approach between energy consumer and producer to give rise to responsible energy generation and consumption.

This award rewards supply solutions within the data centre industry, which demonstrate the achievements in decarbonising the electricity. It is open to data centre operators and to energy providers including vendors and brokers. 

Best Data Centre Sustainability Project of the Year

This award recognises the best sustainable project in the construction of a data centre. It highlights and rewards the construction of data centres from an environmental, social and economic perspective. This involves reducing carbon footprint, alleviating water consumption, heat re-use and avoidance of waste processes in all parts of the supply chain, furthermore the use of recyclable material in construction to the use of local labour. Implementing these aspects are cost-effective, financially beneficial and a prerequisite for environmental sustainability.

The award goes to a data centre that has already been built and has been in operation for preferably more than one year, and where it can be demonstrated, that by using innovative methods or renewable raw materials, heat reuse, or by using local labour, or even by eliminating backup standby assets or/and converting conventional emergency generators to clean fuel;  hydrogen, more can be achieved than by conventional developments to achieve a lasting balance between economic, environmental, and social performance.

The winner will be a data centre designer operator that delivered climate positive results of a sustainable data centre project, prior to the 1st December 2024. 

Commitment to Diversity and Talent Development Award

This award will be presented to a company that can demonstrate commitment to developing talent within their existing workforce, additionally, promoting the data centre sector as a career destination of choice, exemplifying actions to engage with talent and communities raising the awareness of the data centre industry, facilitating access to the data industry mentorships through sponsorships and supporting diversity and inclusion within it.

Most Innovative Partnership of the year 

This award will go to a leading M&A advisory company in the TMT market, or a joint venture partnership, whose efforts have positively affected the international data centre market´s developments in particular. There are no upper limits regarding the deal size or the strategic impact of the deal, the minimum equity deployed should be not less than 100 million € (USD) unleveraged per transaction in size and the deal structure must be innovative to elevate the industry from a traditional transaction and must have been concluded prior to 1st of December 2024.

The winner actively champions the M&A advisory or investment capital in the data centre and cloud market - and will be an international recognized leader in making deals happen.

Best Community Engagement Award

The Data Centre sector is sometimes perceived as rather secretive, with facilities tucked away in industrial estates, disconnected from their local communities. If data centres cannot deliver demonstrable local benefits, then future developments are likely to be questioned by local and regional authorities, even when the broader economic benefits are recognised. In reality, data centres provide economic and social advantages within the communities they operate. Many businesses within the sector have developed exceptional community engagement programmes and delivered real benefits both to their local communities and to broader communities of interest.

This award seeks to recognise the efforts of data centre service providers aimed at improving engagement with local communities. The judges will look for initiatives that deliver material value to local people and help demonstrate that data centres make a positive local contribution. The judges will also consider entries that focus on a broader community of interest including special initiatives developed in response to the current challenges in the market.