M&A, Canada, Montréal, wholesale, hyperscale, SMB
Unsurprisingly, it was a relatively quiet end to the year. But a flurry of M&A activity coming out of Canada and the UK/Europe highlighted the end of December.
There were a pair of deals in Montréal, Québec that came as somewhat of a surprise. Both were focused on wholesale colocation and speak to the emergence of the Montréal market as a landing point for hyperscale platforms in Canada. Vantage entered the market through the purchase of 4Degrees and Cologix expanded its existing Montréal, Québec retail footprint to include wholesale with the acquisition of COLO-D.
Meanwhile, there were a number of deals in Europe and all of them involved private equity and slanted to the SMB side of the market. Cinven acquired One.com, HgCapital took a stake in Belgium’s Combell Group and Inflexion invested in UKFast. There was also a deal of note in the US with DataBank picking up Indianapolis provider LightBound. And finally, HOSTING sold its Stelligent business to Mphasis.
Europe continues to be at the centre of hyperscale builds and end user adoption. Microsoft bought up land in Sweden and UBS is migrating to Azure data centres in Switzerland.
Other end users continue to make big bets on cloud and we came across another big migration from colocation to AWS.
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