M&A, application level, Toronto, interconnection
It was another busy week as the sector is expected to slow in advance of long weekends in the US and Canada as the calendar flips to July.
There were a pair of transactions on the hosting side that were at the top of the headlines. On the managed hosting side, NTT acquired Symmetry, while on the SMB side, WP Engine acquired Flywheel. Both deals speak to how specialization and focus in the hosting space have moved to the application level. Maturity and growth here have led to a point where more transactions are likely to happen. NTT has already shown its appetite to consolidate SAP and Oracle-focused MSPs as has Syntax. Perhaps WP Engine or another platform will do the same with WordPress.
There was also expansion activity in the Toronto market. Ascent confirmed some expansion activity at its facility outside Toronto and Cologix expanded at its 905 King Street West location. The expansions come as strategic activity is said to be circling around the Toronto market. We also published our Toronto data centre supply and interconnection report. Reach out to us for details. Montreal is next (second half 2019).
Interconnection uptake continues to trend aggressively. We have a map of the interconnection nodes in Toronto, Equinix released some interesting data points around uptake, PacketFabric launched a node in Sydney with Equinix and EdgeConneX brought online a cloud on-ramp in Memphis.
There was also more activity around managed third party cloud. We saw this in the Symmetry acquisition, while Velocity confirmed an enterprise application customer and plans to up its game with AWS.
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