Poland has the highest adoption of cloud in the Eastern European region, according to a recent report by Austrian IT company Kapsch.

Polish small and medium-sized enterprises are using cloud services more than any other country in the region with the exception of Turkey. Thirty-one percent of Polish SMEs surveyed for the report said they use a cloud service.

According to a report by ZDNet on Monday, one in five Romanian companies use a cloud service, and 29 percent of companies in Western Austria subscribe to a cloud service.

The report surveyed 900 IT managers from seven countries, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia. The average cloud use across the seven countries is 27 percent.

Thirty-percent of IT managers in Poland plan to migrate at least part of their data to cloud computing within the next three years, and 25 percent plan to buy integrated communication systems.

Around 30 percent of Polish companies allow their employees to use their own mobile devices at work, compared with the 25 percent average across the region. Austria leads in BYOD, with 36 percent of IT managers reporting to allow employees to use their own smartphones or tablets at work.

According to a separate report cited by ZDNet by market research company PMR, the value of the entire cloud market in Poland last year was around €75 million, a 30 percent increase year-over-year.

The central challenge around cloud adoption in Poland is awareness, and educating users on the differences between servers, cloud instances, VPS and dedicated servers or shared hosting, according to ZDNet.

Recently, the WHIR talked to CDN starup CDNlion about its Prague-based business and how it differentiates its CDN on the OnApp platform.

Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge

Wall Street loved IPOs in 2013, and that trend extended to the data center sector. QTS Realty and CyrusOne were the top performers among publicly-held data center companies for 2013 after going public earlier in the year.

But they were the best of a weak bunch. The sector trailed the broader market, as investors cooled on data center stocks amid growing cloud competition and debates about the valuation of service providers.

QTS Realty (QTS) ended the year at $24.78, an 18 percent improvement on the $21 pricing of its IPO in October. Shares of QTS jumped in late December after analysts from Morgan Stanley recommended the stock. CyrusOne(CONE) had its IPO in January at $19 a share, and closed the year 17.5 percent higher at $22.33, recording strong sales along the way. The two newcomers edged out CoreSite Realty (COR), which had the best showing among incumbent data center REITs with a 16.4 percent gain for the year.

Mediocre Gains as Wall Street Advances

Despite those gains, it was a year many data center investors might like to forget, as even the sector’s top performers trailed the broader market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 26.5 percent for the year, while the S&P 500 improved by 29.6 percent and the NASDAQ soared 38.3 percent.

That weak performance marked a departure from recent years, when the data center sector outperformed the market with strong gains in both 2011 and 2012. By early 2013, the lofty valuations for data center and cloud computing companies came under scrutiny on Wall Street, including high-profile debates over the performance of two industry bellwethers, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) and Digital Realty Trust (DLR).

Rackspace had been on the vanguard of the providers gaining from interest in cloud computing, soaring 37 percent in 2011 and 73 percent in 2012. But in February Rackspace shares slid 20 percent after the company’s earnings raised concerns that the rate of adoption for cloud computing services may be moderating. The company was then the focus of a critical writeup in Barron’s asserting that RAX was overvalued. Subsequent earnings stumbles left Rackspace shares down 47 percent for the year, making it the sector’s worst performer.

In May, hedge fund Highfields Capital Management asserted that investors should short shares of Digital Realty, saying the huge data center developer was understating the future investment in facilities that would be required to support its enterprise customers. Digital Realty said Highfields was “mischaracterizing and drawing inaccurate conclusions” from its disclosures, but the debate focused Wall Street’s attention on data center maintenance costs. In October Digital Realty lowered its revenue guidance for the coming year, saying enterprise tenants were deploying new data center space more slowly than expected. That triggered a selloff in data center stocks, which helped push DLR shares to a decline of 27 percent for the year.

As for the fourth quarter performance, the Data Center Investor chart tracks closely with the full-year showings, with QTS and CyrusOne leading the pack, with Rackspace trailing.