Telcos, M&A, SMB, All-in
Another busy week demonstrated the diversity that exits across the sector.
The strategic side highlighted developments in the past week. In the prior week, there were a number of reports about those in pursuit of the Telefonica data centre portfolio. In the past week, there was another divestment, as Canadian cable operator Cogeco Communications sold the Cogeco Peer1 infrastructure services business to Digital Colony. M&A activity within the sector was relatively quiet but we did see Google make another technology acquisition. The deal reflects what Google (and other hyperscale clouds) are thinking about strategically when they add technology through M&A.
Earnings season continued and we took a closer look at the public companies serving the SMB sector: Wix and GoDaddy. Both did well as they continue to use scale and scope to tap into the underlying upside of the business. Meanwhile, another public company on the security services side – Zix – completed its acquisition of hosted email and security provider AppRiver. Guidance was also provided.
The past week saw a number of notable customer wins. Lyft went all-in on AWS and Interxion and Equinix won existing customer expansions in the financial services sector. There were also a pair of interesting wins on the managed third party cloud side. Armor will run security for a customer on AWS and Symmetry won a managed Azure customer for SAP.
Finally, we continued to see momentum in the mid-market. Faction shared data points on its progress and we came across a data centre business developing outside Toronto.
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