M&A, Canada, Asia-pacific, servers, analytics
Another busy week came to a close as the summer holiday season nears.
Picking up where we left off last week, there was more strategic activity. In Canada, new market entrant eStruxture acquired Netelligent, based in Montreal, while Ascenty in Brazil brought in an investment from Blackstone. Over in the UK, as part of iomart’s earnings disclosure, it confirmed the purchase of Ireland hoster Dediserve. And there was another smaller deal in Canada, with Vancouver-based Uniserve picking up a local MSP called Xanity. Finally, Rackspace closed its acquisition of TriCore and released some details about where it will sit organizationally.
The cloud and wholesale colocation continues to move in lockstep as the global infrastructure build out continues. Asia was at the centre of the most recent activity. Google followed up its opening of a cloud region in Singapore with another location in Sydney, Australia. Google also picked up another customer. Meanwhile, AWS confirmed it would open a cloud node in Hong Kong.
Alibaba recently revealed plans to build cloud locations in Jakarta and Mumbai. It did not add to the list of locations in the past week, but confirmed a new partnership with China-based data centre operator GDS and rolled out a new database and analytics hosting service out of its European cloud location in Germany. Back to Canada, Urbacon is said to be serving a major cloud provider (there aren’t that many of them) out of its new suburban Toronto wholesale data centre. We have details.
There was activity on the vendor side. Lenovo’s data centre group rolled out a new server portfolio with offerings tailored for service providers and OVH continues to be one of the few that builds its own servers and released some data points about this. Elsewhere, Ubersmith released the latest version of its management platform for service providers.
The SMB space was busy as well. GoDaddy released some new products, Squarespace added more analytics capabilities as it pushes more aggressively to equip online merchants and WP Engine did some things around analytics as well.
Amazon is always top of mind in the infrastructure services sector and a number of things it is doing on the strategic side speak to its far-reaching impact. AWS is not really a player in the messaging, collaboration and unified communications space just yet, but it is actively building products and this past week rumours emerged it might try to acquire Slack. Were this to happen, it would accelerate its efforts considerably. Slack, however, would be a ‘small’ acquisition compared to what it pulled off with Whole Foods. The cloud angle? Whole Foods is a Microsoft shop and now falls under the Amazon umbrella.
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