Earnings, cloud nodes, telco divestments, global expansion
It was a busy week as earnings season shed light on important industry dynamics and cloud infrastructure expansion continues to drive an increasingly global business. There were also some important strategic developments and activity in the channel.
Earnings season continues and we took a closer look at the results from Interxion, QTS and Endurance International. Data centre operators have performed steadily as the wholesale market continues to transform the growth profile of providers and end user requirements continue to shift towards power. Given the reality on the ground, measuring data centre capacity on the basis of space – as many legacy research firms do exclusively – is rapidly decreasing in value if not becoming largely irrelevant.
The global cloud build out continues and the past few weeks have seen significant levels of activity. Amazon is adding VMware Cloud on AWS locations, iland added a cloud node in Australia and OVH spun up a new cloud node in the US for its OpenStack-based cloud.
Telco divestments of data centre and infrastructure assets has been a consistent theme in the last several years. In recent months, we saw AT&T divest a portfolio of data centres to Brookfield and a number of sources revealed that Telefonica in Spain is contemplating a similar move. Elsewhere on the strategic side, NTT Data Services acquired a Canadian MSP/SI, Neustar purchased Verisign’s security business and Lenovo took a stake and partnered up with Scale Computing.
In the capital markets, Dreamhost and ScienceLogic secured credit facilities to fund growth initiatives.
Increasingly these days, cloud and data centre expansion are moving in lockstep. Clouds are not just adding capacity, they are moving into markets around the world. And data centre operators are following and getting more involved in primary markets around the world. CyrusOne is one of those providers. In the past year it has made a strategic investment in APAC, recently partnered up to build in The Netherlands and is eyeing other markets in Europe as well.
Finally, on the channel side, distributors are building out cloud-based channels. Tech Data integrated with CloudCheckr to enhance public cloud management and Ingram Micro partnered up with CenturyLink for its private cloud service.
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