Digital Realty, M&A, global, expansions, managed cloud
It was a busy week across the sector with Digital Realty at the forefront of the activity.
The Digital Realty merger with Interxion will alter the competitive landscape in the data centre sector and we take a closer look. Meanwhile, Digital also released data points coming out of its earnings call that pointed to renewal momentum and expansion activity across Europe, APAC, LatAm and Canada.
Cloud is of course a big driver of what is going on at Digital and the Interxion acquisition speaks to how it is increasingly taking a global approach. And there is no clearer evidence of the global variable than Amazon’s continued global expansion plans. In the past week, AWS confirmed it will bring online a new European region in Spain, along with acquisition of a site in Argentina. Now that Interxion is coming into the fold, Digital will be uniquely positioned to serve hyperscale opportunities like the one coming in Spain.
On the cloud side, there was more strategic activity as Rackspace picked up one of the managed third cloud providers – Onica – that was looking like it could be a consolidator of these assets. There continues to be growing focus and specialization and Armor, once a competitor to Rackspace, is now partnering with it and selling its security technology. Managed third party cloud continues to develop as a new segment and a newly founded company – Effectual – brought in private equity investment capital from Lumerity Capital.
Back to the data centre space, there was continued expansion activity and service providers remain a strong driver of demand. MaxiHost stood up two new nodes withCologix and New York Internet, Wasabi deployed with Iron Mountain, Lucera moved out globally with Equinix, while Aligned Energy, Stream and Global Switch were all active.
Finally, there was more SMB activity. 1&1 partnered with Dropsuite for backup and archiving and Gigas in Spain continues to use M&A to scale its business, picking up a provider in Portugal.
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