M&A, APAC, managed third party cloud shops, cloud expansion
The sector continues to kick back into gear after the summer holiday season lull. There was a slew of strategic activity and a lot of it came out of the SMB side of the sector and the Asia-pacific region.
There were a number of notable transactions. On the SMB side, control panel vendor Plesk added to its capabilities with the acquisition of XOVI, a SEO and social media tracking and analytics platform, while GoDaddy finalized its sale of the PlusServer managed hosting business, which was picked up by BC Partners.
Meanwhile, a number of strategic developments came out of the Asia-pacific region. Former Digital Realty executives have secured backing to build a pan-APAC data centre platform under the flag Bridge Data Centers. India is said to be the first market it is targeting, but there are a number of other markets also being considered. On the SMB side in APAC, Dreamscape in Australia picked up Vodien as it looks to expand into the SEA region. There continues to be activity in Australia on the SMB side as VentraIP closed a small deal and word emerged that another sizeable SMB provider has been acquired.
There were noteworthy developments in the emerging cloud on-boarding space. Managed hosters have acquired consulting and on-boarding shops, but those same shops are also looking to expand through M&A. One of them – REAN Cloud – added big data skill sets with the purchase of 47Lining. And a new shop – Bespin Global in Korea and China – confirmed it had raised $15m in a Series A round.
The build out of cloud infrastructure continued unabated. Google brought online a new zone in the UK (and disclosed some of its customers there) and could be looking at more locations in Europe. SaaS platforms are also piggybacking on this cloud footprint expansion and in the past week we saw Box partner up with Azure to add more geographical diversity. The data centres supporting clouds also continued to expand. Equinix expanded in Sydney and we have a number of data points on providers in Toronto and Montreal, which are also in active pursuit of large cloud deals.
Finally, Microsoft has been active in the market and confirmed that Azure Stack will start to ship in the next few months. This will have a big impact on how far Azure can go as it looks to move its legacy base to the cloud all the while making it possible to still straddle and combine with alternative deployment models. It is not just looking for all-in bets. It is looking to facilitate a measured, strategic and incremental migration to cloud.
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