M&A, Asia-pacific, Europe, WordPress, cloud builds, managed third party cloud
The end of the year is typically slow across the sector, but there were a number of notable developments on the M&A side of things.
The high-profile transactions took place in global markets as US-based providers with scale were the buyers moving to extend their footprints. Towards the end of December, Equinix confirmed its acquisition of Australia’s Metronode, while CyrusOne picked up Zenium’s wholesale data centre footprint in the UK and Frankfurt markets. Both deals speak to the importance of providing global footprints for colocation and interconnection customers.
On the hosting and cloud side, WordPress specialist WP Engine took a significant investment from Silver Lake, while in the UK, iomart made another deal on the e-commerce side. Meanwhile, ABRY took a stake in MSP and application hoster Breakthrough and there were some small changes with the ownership structure at Global Switch, while Sabey secured new financing.
Another theme late into the year was the continued global cloud build out. Amazon continues to explore moving into global markets and it expanded in France, while working on further flung locations like South Africa and the Middle East. Alibaba is similarly looking at the Middle East.
Finally, the managed third party cloud market was relatively quiet, but Rackspace confirmed some customers for its Google Cloud business in a sign that this practice is starting to pick up some momentum.
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