M&A, APAC, application hosting, interconnection
It was a busy week across the board and this was expected as the US Thanksgiving long weekend is quickly approaching. Strategic activity was front and centre and there were a number of interesting developments around interconnection. The APAC region was also active.
There were a number of notable transactions. NTT continues to purchase infrastructure service assets and pivoted over to the application side with the acquisition of managed application hoster Secure-24. Managed applications are not an entirely new focus of NTT’s M&A strategy. Its Dimension Data arm acquired Microsoft application hoster Ceryx last year.
In other M&A developments, Green House Data acquired cloud provider Ajubeo, Right Networks picked up Xentric and euNetworks got a new majority owner. We also saw Datto merge with Autotask. Finally, the Rackspace acquisition of Datapipe closed officially and there were a number of executive shuffles that came with that.
There continues to be activity in the APAC region and this past week saw a number of developments come out of Australia. AirTrunk brought online a wholesale facility in Melbourne, while NEXTDC added an AWS Direct Connect node in Perth. Elsewhere in Asia, OneAsia opened a fourth data centre in Hong Kong and Keppel Data Centers partnered with SGX.
Another key development coming out of Asia crosses from the data centre to the interconnection side of the game. PCCW in Hong Kong acquired the Console interconnection platform and will integrate the technology to enable interconnections to clouds and networks. Interconnection is increasingly a driver of infrastructure outsourcing and more specifically, migrations to new infrastructure deployment models. An excellent example of this was DBS in Singapore moving out of a corporate data centre to Equinix’s colocation facilities. It also moved other workloads to public cloud and interconnecting through Equinix’s platform was an important piece of the puzzle. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google continue to do battle and improve upon their networking and interconnection capabilities.
Building activity remained steady. Digital Realty opened a second Frankfurt data centre, Global Switch outlined plans to expand in London, while Peak 10 + ViaWest acquired and expanded in Philadelphia and Denver. Hosting and cloud providers rarely build data centres, but OVH is one of them. It suffered a big outage in Strasbourg and is now diverting valuable resources to deal with the issue.
The SMB space was also active. Squarespace added an analytics mobile app and GoDaddy partnered with Square.
We are still digging through earnings season, but more privately held companies shared data points about their financials. Russia’s IXcellerate was one of them
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