2025, 2 WEEK CASE STUDY, THE NETHERLANDS

ecosystem development

Case Study : Data Centre Ecosystem in the Netherlands
- Cloud services are playing an increasingly important role in the Dutch economy and in society as a whole. The percentage of Dutch businesses using cloud services in 2021 rose to 65%, a rise of 12 percentage points compared to the previous year.
- Other organizations, including in the public sector, such as schools, care institutions and government bodies, are also increasingly using cloud services.
- 92% of all Dutch companies with more than 50 employees used SaaS services in 2021, compared to 67% in 2019.
- In sectors such as education, government, and healthcare, the level of use was even nearly 100% in 2021.
Revenues in the cloud market have also grown substantially in the Netherlands in recent years.

What tools, methods and approaches can be designed to develop a sustainble ecosystem for enterprise cloud data centres in the Netherlands?

Enterprise Data Centre Trends :

1. Short-term reliance on fossil fuels
- AI-driven energy demand surge
- Short-term reliance on fossil fuels is slowing grid decarbonization

2. Sustainable and modular architectures
- Innovative technologies, e.g. prefabricated modular data halls for - minimum waste growth and reuse of waste heat

3. Nuclear Energy Exploration
- Hyperscalers opting for nuclear power for stable energy supply

4. Consideration of climate & regional constraints
- Site selection influenced by energy availability, rising costs in saturated markets, regulations, general climate and climate risks

5. On-site renewable generation & storage
- Integration of on and near-site solar/wind power
- Battery storage systems enhance energy resilience and reduce grid dependency

Benefits:

1. Cost Saving
- Hardware and infrastructure investments are eliminated

2. Pay-as-you-go model
- Scalability and flexibility
- Flexibility in computing power
- Rapid deployment of requirement change

3. Digital Age Transition
- Global accessibility especially post Covid
- Innovation and Growth

4. Offloading IT infrastructure and data center management allows sector growth

5. Security and Reliability
- Cloud providers support with layers of protection

Challenges:

1. Strategic oversight
- Insufficient risk assessments
- Requirement to keep updating insight on cloud usage

2. Operational Challenges
- Vendor lock-in creating dependency
- High migration costs

3. Downtime
- Impact on workflows

4. Non-EU and hyperscalers
- Extensive reliance on non-EU cloud providers
- Data sovereignty concerns

5. Security and Reliability
- EU data protection and privacy laws
- Data breaches

What kind of stakeholders are we talking about?

Using the ecosystem map to briefly map out the associated stakeholders

If we had to focus on one stakeholder (in this case a DC user) and develop a use case between user and provider/client, how would that be done?

using the X-Y axis matrix to map important metrics for identifying potential DC users

a user profile expands on a persona and gives context to the users (inspired by user persona tool)

spider map to define KPIs/metrics that would align a user to the client or user needs to client needs quantifiably (inspired by spider maps used in product LCA and ecosystem pie map tools)

How do we move away from planning to action?

inspired from the power/influence vs interest tool to finally map multi-level stakeholder involvement and expanded into actions for each stakeholder

Finally, what does the roadmap for this complex stakeholder management and ecosystem development look like?

Futures oriented brief project roadmap which not only mentions the phases of the project but also the scenario it would build (inspired by the speculative cone and other roadmap tools)

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