Earnings, strategic developments, Europe, AWS
The sector continued to push forward as earnings season is in full swing. Meanwhile, we found some very interesting and useful data points around AWS and tracked a number of data centre expansions, with an emphasis on Europe.
We continue to dig through earnings season and started on the SMB side with Endurance International and Spain’s Gigas. Endurance continues to struggle as the new management team tries to get the business on firmer footing. Gigas is a listed cloud infrastructure provider in Spain that serves both SMB and mid-tier customers. It is growing steadily and this speaks to the situation in Europe and the growth that is still happening in focused infrastructure infrastructure services with meaningful value-add.
Zayo reported as well and experienced sluggish results on the colocation and infrastructure hosting side. Zayo also confirmed it would not split the firms (as was being considered) and potentially create a standalone data centre/infrastructure/managed services arm. This came as a bit of a surprise and amid media reports that Telefonica’s data centre footprint is being bid on by multiple parties.
Elsewhere in Europe, Echelon in Ireland disclosed plans to enter the wholesale data centre market, while IXcellerate in Russia and DigiPlex in Sweden opened or confirmed expansions. And on the end user side, Hydro66 confirmed a new colocation customer win.
AWS continues to grow and we found a few very interesting data points around its data centre footprint and the amount of leasing versus building it does. AWS also recently shared some data points on how it backs up its S3 storage service.
The cloud side was somewhat quieter this past week, but we tracked another Google Cloud win and Oracle Cloud opened up a new data centre in MEA to support its first cloud infrastructure node in the region. Meanwhile, head of Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, shared some insights about its strategy going forward.
or