M&A, MSP, managed third party cloud, portfolio expansions, cloud wins
It was a very busy week across the sector, with a number of developments in the managed hosting space as service providers continue to transform their portfolios as they pivot into the new competitive landscape. Meanwhile, there was a lot of M&A activity, particularly around MSPs and managed third party cloud.
The question around managed hosting services, especially for colocation providers, is whether to exit or continue competing. QTS decided on the former and confirmed that it will send a number of customers to GDT, while continuing to partner with them. Cyxtera, on the other hand, is taking a different angle. As part of its launch of a new management platform, Cyxtera rolled out a compute infrastructure offering based on hyperconverged infrastructure stacks.
Portfolio expansion is part and parcel of competing in this new environment. In the past week, Rackspace rolled out an expanded bare metal portfolio, partially with an eye to HPC workloads, while operations management provider ScienceLogic released its latest upgrade, which uses AI to produce actionable insights that service providers can use to expand their service portfolios.
The M&A arena has been active the last few weeks. On the MSP side, Evolve IP acquired a unified communications provider, Reliam scaled up its managed AWS practice with the purchase of Stratalux, Whoa.com acquired a couple MSPs, while Claranet in the UK closed yet another deal.
There were also a number of cloud developments. Google won another logo, while establishing a partnership with IT services firm Atos Origin, and Microsoft won a number of deals. And not to be overlooked, AWS updated its services and features for GDPR and reiterated its infrastructure footprint plans for the year. Uptake in cloud is clearly moving in a forward direction. But there are still specialized and focused services competing and winning. Virtustream is seeing momentum in the healthcare vertical and Nutanix is working on an enterprise-grade public cloud, though it revealed that it would have to delay its launch.
Finally, managed third party cloud stayed on the radar. We mentioned the Reliam acquisition of Stratalux, but managed third party specialist Bespin Global in Korea shared some data points about its growth trajectory and Ensono helped another organization move to Azure.
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