I've joked that part of the reason I can talk to so many different companies in the data center business is because we are talking at a low level that most don't care about - the plumbing in data centers.

Competing at a low level in data centers is as if BofA and Wells Fargo said they wanted to compete on Plumbing. That's silly. BofA and Wells Fargo both want the best plumbing to run their business. What connects to the plumbing and goes through the pipes we don't really talk about.

The Economist has a post on Plumbers in Suits, Markit an unknown company to many that connects much of the financial system. This financial plumbing is the data goes through the pipes and what it is connected to.

Markit

Plumbers in suits

A private company controlled by banks connects much of the financial system

Jul 6th 2013 |From the print edition

FEW people outside finance have heard of Markit. This week afforded two examples of how the company has worked itself into the fabric of the financial system. On July 1st it released a decent set of purchasing-managers’ indices (PMIs), a closely watched series of confidence gauges it compiles each month. That sparked a day-long rally. That same day the European Commission accused 13 big investment banks of having rigged the market for credit derivatives. The complaint also cited Markit for allegedly helping to prevent exchanges from entering the business.

Plumbing may not be glamorous, but Markit has visions of high growth.

Mr Uggla thinks Markit can double in size again in the next three to five years, and then again shortly thereafter. That would put it in the same league as Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters or McGraw-Hill Financial (the owner of Standard & Poor’s, a ratings agency). Its hope is that post-crisis regulations will prove so complex as to send banks scurrying to Markit asking it to take over even more of their back-office operations.

That kind of growth rate sounds like some of the top data center companies.