AWS, cloud, managed third party cloud, application hosting, earnings
The week following the US Thanksgiving weekend is one of the busier in the sector and it all revolves around the AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas. The number of announcements was overwhelming and we will look at them more closely in the coming weeks. We do have a quick few comments on one that is very relevant to the managed hosting space: AWS now has a bare metal EC2 option. The best example of the bare metal value proposition is the former SoftLayer platform that now powers the IBM Cloud. IBM recently confirmed that it is in the midst of a platform re-write that is being built for the next-generation of workloads coming into the pipeline. No doubt AWS has eyes on similar slices of the market with this new bare metal option.
Maybe the biggest takeaway coming out of re:Invent was a simple fact: Amazon continues to invest and will continue to innovate. It is not trying to optimize the business or drive profits. It is still very much in scale and innovation mode.
The broader sector continues to shift in response to what the big clouds are doing. This past week, Great Hill Partners took a stake in Reliam, a managed third party cloud shop that has some hosting and managed services roots. Notably, a former hosting executive – Simon Anderson, former CEO of DreamHost – will take over as the CEO. Another firm that has transitioned in a similar direction is newly branded Onica, which took on a $20m investment to chase the managed third party cloud market. And down in Australia, Macquarie is looking to acquire managed third party cloud shop Bulletproof.
The application hosting space is also inching towards the managed third party cloud model and BV Investment Partners took a stake in an Oracle specialist called Apps Associates. It hosts and runs infrastructure on the public cloud. Meanwhile, Hostway continues to transform its business and moved into the managed AWS space.
Earnings season is winding down and we continue to look through the results. We take a closer look at Equinix this past week and on the private side, we got some insight into how Claranet in the UK is doing and Global Switch shared some data points as well.
Finally, there were a number of wins that again demonstrate how much the move to cloud is accelerating.
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