M&A, hyperscale, hybrid, expansions, hires
It was another busy week marked by more M&A activity and continued momentum for Google’s cloud.
There were a number of transactions of note. On the hosting and managed services side, the US arm of Dutch hoster LeaseWeb acquired ServInt and UK-based Claranet picked up an MSP in the UK with an Azure competency called Union Solutions. Cloud consultancies continue to be a hot commodity and also in the UK, Accenture acquired Oracle shop Certus. Finally, in APAC, Keppel DC REIT acquired independent colocation operator Kingsland Data Centre.
Google continues to gather momentum in cloud. It added yet another logo with the addition of Twitter to its roster. Twitter is also a big user of colocation and this move shows how workloads are increasingly being matched to differing underlying infrastructure services. Meanwhile, Google added another region to its footprint – this time landing in Switzerland.
Twitter’s case is a sign of incremental cloud use from big media and content platforms. But these platforms continue to buy big blocks of colocation capacity. Switch, for example, confirmed a big win on the streaming content side. And with the demand still chugging along, new company formation continues to be found on the wholesale colocation side. This week we came across another wholesale data centre platform in development – this one coming from Canada. And there continues to be expansion. EdgeConneX confirmed a number of major expansions, Equinix is building again in Tokyo and Global Switch is closing in on opening in Singapore later this year.
Another theme this past week was on the hiring side of things. Hostway bought in a senior technology person, eStruxture added a senior operations person and T5 put in an additional senior leader in sales. But the highest profile hire was Equinix picking up Jim Smith from Microsoft. Smith will be leading the developing hyperscale business at Equinix.
Earnings season is moving along and this past week we took a closer look at the results coming from CoreSite and Nasstar in the UK.
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