Global cloud build out, third party cloud, earnings
It was a busy week that saw a continuation of the global cloud build out, more activity around managed third party cloud and the kick off of earnings season.
Cloud expansion was pervasive. The big platforms were again at the centre of the activity. IBM added four more data centres in two top US markets and Office 365 added a data centre in South Korea. Asia-based clouds are also expanding globally and Tencent Cloud, with its cloud growth rates moving up, laid out plans to expand in multiple markets outside China. Oracle is building heavily right now as it moves more of its business to cloud and SaaS, and NetSuite is likely to be pushing its data centre requirements – highly global in scope – further. Meanwhile, on a lesser scale, UK-based Carrenza opened up its first cloud nodes in the US.
There was more activity around managed third party cloud, particularly at Rackspace. It has beefed up its professional services and consulting capabilities for not just AWS, but its entire portfolio of third party clouds. Meanwhile, Connectria is upping its capabilities around Azure to complement its AWS practice. Rackspace also shared some interesting data points around customer uptake in managed third party cloud that matches up with what others providers are seeing.
Direct connects continue to enable a lot of the uptake in cloud and Equinix released a data point that shows where things are trending.
Earning season is underway and we’ll have more details going forward. We start with a look at UK-based Interoute’s 2016 results, while in China, China Mobile and Tencent released data points about its infrastructure services growth trajectory. The vendor side is also instructive and Veeam’s results speak to the level of growth in DR and backup and how third party service providers continue to see uptake and are outpacing the in-house market.
There was also activity on the SMB side. Recently, MelbourneIT suffered an outage after being the victim of a DDoS attack, while Wix and Weebly added yet more capabilities to their site builder platforms.
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