Structure Research

Earnings season continues to be in full swing andInternap was the latest on the hosting side to report. Performances have been up and down across the board with many firms showing at least some slowing down of growth. Web.com recently reported and its results reflected this trend. However, in what is still a relatively unpredictable environment, Internap bucked the slowdown trend and showed a slight rebound after a weaker 3Q12. The bumpiness in the sector we have been speaking about persists.

The M&A landscape was quiet after a run of developments in the past few weeks and firms are now focusing on integration and expansion. We had a chance to chat with PEER1 after its acquisition by Cogeco Cable in Canada officially closed. At PEER1 things promise to be business as usual as another strategic provider enters the space but is wisely erring on the side of caution.

Elsewhere in the sector, we saw more signs of expansion and growth. Interxion shared its latest expansion plans in Europe, while Dallas continues to be a strong data centre market with QTS entering and Cologix opening up a second facility. Meanwhile, Rackspace shared some details about its growth in the UK and Europe. Another indication of sector growth is the move up-market many hosters are pursuing. To that end SingleHop decided to build out a new cloud infrastructure service based on VMware technology. The cloud continues to grow quickly and we gathered more data points about momentum – this time from PEER1 - this past week.

Finally, we wanted to make a quick comment about our research content. As regular readers will know, we post daily to our site and publish this weekly update to draw your attention to the week’s posts (and to avoid piling up items in your inbox). We also provide snippets of information on our Twitter feed (@phils88888 and @structureres). The tweets provide easily consumable pieces of information of relevance to the sector but not necessarily requiring additional commentary. We want to keep our regular analysis at the highest levels of quality and refuse to dilute our product with “filler”. But information – no matter how big or small – still has value and we believe Twitter is the more efficient, economical and affordable way to deliver it. In short, we charge for insight and analysis. There is no reason why you should pay for basic factual information. You can get that from us on Twitter!