Structure Research

It has definitely been another busy week so far. We are now right in the swing of things with earnings. PEER1 was the first of the few public hosting companies to report and it had a very solid quarter, with particularly healthy growth on the managed hosting side of the business. It got a nice boost from a short-term but sizeable hosting customer but even factoring that out, solid organic growth was there. There has been some lumpiness at PEER1 but the last few quarters suggest things are picking up. PEER1 is right there with much of the sector, turning in annual hosting growth at around the 20% clip.

Other notable developments so far this week include Amazon again reducing pricing for the S3 cloud storage service. Amazon is taking advantage of scale and is using it to gain competitive edge. It goes without saying this will have an impact on hosters and make it increasingly crucial to optimize and drive operational efficiencies. Meanwhile, Hostway launched FlexLink, which enables hybrid infrastructure deployments between managed hosting/colocation and public cloud infrastructure. The move to hybrid continues to gather momentum and is increasingly becoming a must-have capability.

We also sense some more heat developing in the European cloud market. We talked to both Interoute and Joyent this past week. Interoute recently launched a new cloud infrastructure service positioned around its pan-European network. And Joyent recently raised $85m and will partner with one of its new investors – Telefónica Digital – to build out a retail cloud infrastructure service in Europe. It should be an intriguing year for Europe.

We’ll cut it short here due to a very busy briefing schedule. But as we mentioned here last time, we plan to be at the Parallels Summit in Orlando next week so please drop us a line if you would like to meet. You can direct message us on Twitter or send an email to me directly.

Thanks for your support and we hope to speak with you soon.