Cloud nodes, subsea cables, SMB, HPC
It was a short and relatively quiet week as we moved through the Easter long weekend.
The global cloud build out continues and we saw a number of developments. ViaWest added a node in Denver, Fpweb added a node in Montreal, while Nexcess expanded its capacity in the UK with 4D, who we also had a chance to meet with recently. A lot of the clouds and infrastructure service providers have expanded around the world with Equinix as their data centre partner. And business has been good. Equinix recently revealed more expansion plans that are undoubtedly driven by a lot of this cloud expansion.
Meanwhile, Google and a number of partners will build the INDIGO submarine cable in southeast asia with the goal of making it easier to push traffic across the region. Google is building for future growth and high performance.
Speaking of performance, there has been a run of new HPC services and this past week we looked at what IBM has done with its NVIDIA partnership. IBM has focused a lot of energy on HPC scenarios and all this is coming full circle with its analytics, machine learning and up-market enterprise focus.
The SMB side of the market was active. Deluxe rolled out a payment processing partnership as it looks to enable e-commerce and its retail arm made an acquisition in the Asia-pacific region. Elsewhere in APAC, Azure in Japan suffered an outage due to data centre infrastructure issues.
A lot is being made about analytics and machine learning – most of it on the customer side. But service providers and hosters are also using it to improve back end operational and sales efficiency. We take a quick look at what Weebly is doing on this side. Expect more on this front in the coming months.
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