M&A, cloud expansions, appointments, migrations
Things continue to push forward as the summer winds down and the sector moves into the stretch run for 2019.
It has been a busy summer on the strategic side of things. This past week, RDX, backed by Madison Dearborn, acquired Navisite from Charter Communications as telcos continue to divest or restructure their infrastructure services portfolios. In recent weeks, we’ve also seen transactions on the network and interconnection side (BSO acquiring IX Reach), messaging and unified communications (Intermedia buying Telax), and consulting shops expanding specific cloud capabilities (Deloitte picking up NeoData; and Apps Associates purchasing SmartDog).
The last two transactions were around Oracle Cloud. Oracle continues to build out a global footprint and its latest node was spun up in Zurich, Switzerland.
Real estate-oriented firms continue to move into digital infrastructure and that means another new set of buyers, joining infrastructure funds, looking at data centres. APAC has seen quite a bit of this activity and there was reporting that Singapore’s Wing Tai acquired a data centre in Melbourne, Australia.
There was also movement in executive circles. We recently saw Digital Ocean make a number of changes to its management team and the same happened in recent months at Web.com. Meanwhile, INAP brought in a new president and CFO.
Developments around edge have been a bit quiet these past few months, but CenturyLink made some noise this past week as it confirmed plans to make a significant investment in edge compute capabilities. With a network, CDN and data centre footprint, CenturyLink has the existing assets to take advantage of and get things moving.
Finally, there were more case studies demonstrating where infrastructure is moving. Logicworks and Tata migrated customers to public cloud and Cisco is evaluating its own internal data centre strategy.
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