SMB, Europe, Asia, expansions, M&A, numbers
It was another busy week with a number of interesting developments in the SMB space, significant data centre expansion activity in Europe and Asia, along with some notable strategic activity.
The SMB side continues to evolve and in the past week we saw Squarespace partner up with Instagram as it continues to expand the reach of its platform into ecosystems of value. SMB hosters continue to evolve and transform the services they offer. Two transactions in recent weeks were undertaken with this goal in mind. GoDaddy ventured into blockchain and trademark protection services with the acquisition of Cognate. Meanwhile, Deluxe has been focused on serving SMBs but has not strayed too far away from shared and virtual servers. That changed in recent weeks with the acquisition of ColoCrossing, a colocation and dedicated server provider.
Another trend well underway in the SMB hosting space is the shift to asset-light operating models. This past week, we came across a provider – UK-based Wirehive – that started as a traditional hoster but has moved more and more customers to public cloud.
There was also more M&A activity on the managed third party cloud side. Claranet is acquiring as many shops as it can and this past week extended that strategy into the Italian market with the acquisition of a company called XPeppers.
There was plenty of activity on the data centre side as cloud continues to drive the wholesale market. NTT is building more inventory in Osaka, Colt DCS and VIRTUS are expanding in London and German operator Hetzner is building in Finland and could also be looking at the wholesale market. And also in Asia, Keppel and The Salim Group formed a joint venture to build a data centre outside Jakarta, Indonesia.
In the US, Flexential completed a build in Portland, DC BLOX opened a facility in Alabama and Aligned Energy disclosed plans to build a campus in Ashburn, Virginia.
Finally, Digital Ocean shared some data points on its progress and we look at numbers from Interxion.
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