M&A, data centre, edge, strategics
The past week was highlighted by a number of interesting transactions and data points on the growth of private companies as the sector heads into earnings season later this week.
In M&A, there was another cloud consulting transaction as Hitachi made another deal and acquired a Microsoft-Azure shop called Capax Global. Meanwhile, on the messaging and security side, Zix acquired AppRiver as it looks to scale and get in front of the procurement cycle. Elsewhere, an interesting deal in the UK saw TIG acquire financial services specialist netConsult.
There was also M&A on the data centre side. New Continuum in Chicago took ownership of the land supporting its data centre and late last year, News, Press & Gazette acquired Nebraska Data Centers.
M&A is also driving edge data centre plays. EdgeConnex made another edge data centre acquisition in Europe; this time in Germany.
Still on the strategic side of things, a number of telcos are said to be considering data centre asset divestitures. The latest reporting has Zayo moving along in this process and attracting a number of private equity firms and infrastructure funds.
Earnings season will kick off this Thursday and fittingly leads with Amazon and its fourth quarter and annual results. But as the calendar turned to 2019, we did get some insight into private company growth this past week. AppRiver’s performance was shared in the Zix deal, Ensono shared some data points about its growth and WordPress hoster WP Engine similarly provided some colour. Growth continues to be present in various pockets within the sector.
There is movement in edge happening and we will have some more details next week. But AWS disclosed some interesting insights into how it views the new product Outposts. The punch line: they see this as a potential edge play.
Finally, there was some shuffling in executive circles as managed hoster Contegix brought in a new CEO, and there was more public cloud adoption as BigCommerce became the latest to move to Google Cloud and Smithfield Foods moved to Virtustream for SAP.
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