SMB, managed third party cloud, M&A, Europe
Another busy week was highlighted by activity in the SMB space, more activity around managed third party cloud, M&A, strategic activity in Europe and earnings season.
The SMB hosting space has been quiet of late, but there were a number of notable developments this past week. 1&1 Internet, a mainstay in the market, decided to re-brand the company after merging the ProfitBricks cloud infrastructure arm. The re-brand also comes with a new approach for selling into the SMB market. Elsewhere, Hostopia confirmed a new partnership with Open-Xchange to wholesale messaging and collaboration for service providers, with a specific focus on Canada, and we looked at another recent deal closed by Exabytes in Malaysia. Consolidation in the SMB market continues to be active in Australia and southeast Asia.
The managed third party cloud market continues to develop and evolve. Ensono continues to grow this part of its business and is taking a long-term view, positioning to move legacy customers and workloads to public cloud. To that end, it partnered with Astadia to help its customers running in these kinds of legacy environments to make the cloud journey. Other providers continue to innovate around value-add. Logicworks in New York, for example, rolled out a new data protection service for customers running on S3, and in APAC, Korean provider MegazoneCloud deployed the New Relic application monitoring platform to its managed cloud service.
Elsewhere, the global cloud buildout continues. AWS expanded to South Africa and specialized provider CloudSigma opened a new cloud node in Dublin.
The M&A arena has been somewhat quiet of late. But there were some interesting developments, mostly around cloud. Accenture acquired an Oracle cloud partner, Logicalis added to its Azure capabilities through acquisition and in Europe, Claranet acquired an MSP called Quinfox.
Europe has seen plenty of activity in recent weeks. Interxion confirmed expansions in Frankfurt and Marseille, while also becoming an investor in a provider in Kenya. Meanwhile, Rackspace released plans to expand in Europe, with a new office in Germany, New Relic opened a new node in Germany and Ensono named a new European MD. There were also some notable European/UK customer wins with UKFast winning a government contract and Viatel winning a managed colocation contract in Dublin.
Earnings season is in full swing and this week we take a closer look at results coming from Digital Realty and CoreSite.
or