M&A, consolidation, all-in bets, cloud nodes and attacks
It was a very busy week as there were a number of high-profile developments in the M&A arena.
Picking up where we left off last week, we have details and commentary on the Digital Realty acquisition of DuPont Fabros. The other high-profile deal saw Peak 10 acquire ViaWest from Shaw Communications just three years after it originally acquired ViaWest. The deal creates an extensive national footprint for Peak 10 across multiple secondary markets. Meanwhile, more on the hosting side, Contegix made a multi-faceted acquisition and picked up Ashburn-based hoster BlackMesh and in Europe, Norway’s Basefarm acquired a Germany-based managed hoster as it looks to expand into Germany and Austria and add database management capabilities.
We continue to see movement to the public cloud. AWS disclosed another of its ‘all-in’ customers and continues to convince enterprises that they can run all their IT infrastructure in its cloud. However, there are cases where moving away from cloud happens. Facebook’s messaging application WhatsApp has decided to move off IBM’s cloud and back into in-house data centres.
The global cloud build out continued with Asia being the focus this past week. Google is set to bring online its first cloud location in Singapore, which is also its first in the southeast Asia region. Google is playing catch up with the other clouds that have all landed in the southeast Asia region and Alibaba confirmed this week that it would open data centres for its cloud in Jakarta and Mumbai. Alibaba also partnered up with Equinix for direct connectivity to its cloud in multiple markets. Elsewhere in Asia, Dropbox set up a PoP in Sydney, Australia and we look at the latest developments at the ST Telemedia data centre operation in Singapore.
There were some unfortunate incidents that impacted hosters in Europe and Asia. A ransomeware attack hit a hoster in South Korea and an allegedly disgruntled employee took down a hosting company in The Netherlands. The incidents speak to how vulnerable hosters, particularly smaller ones, can be to a disaster that can literally end the business.
Finally, there were a number of notable data centre expansions. Infomart is readying its Ashburn site. Equinix is set to go in Amsterdam, Colt expanded and upgraded in Madrid. Green Data expanded to Dallas, and also in Dallas, DataBank acquired a data centre from Stream Data Centres.
or