M&A, funding, Oracle Cloud, hyperscale, expansions
It was another busy week marked by M&A and a number of interesting developments in cloud.
The deals we looked at this week were of relatively modest size, but contributed to the overall strategy of the buyers. In Toronto, CentriLogic acquired Chicago-based ManageForce as it moves more forcefully into the application layer, while FirstLight and Colospace combined data centre colocation, infrastructure hosting and fibre assets. Elsewhere, GI Partners acquired a stake in DR Fortress in Hawaii and in Europe, Dutch provider TWS continued its ongoing effort to consolidate the SMB hosting market in The Netherlands.
The managed third party cloud space did not see any M&A, but Lemongrass Consulting raised a Series C round. Interconnection is another part of the market that is developing quickly. Intercloud in France raised capital to build its cloud interconnect platform and Megaport reported its latest quarterly results, which showed strong and consistent growth and adoption.
There was plenty of activity in the public cloud space. Oracle has been building out its data centre footprint and we have some data points on how it is doing this. The Oracle Cloud and Azure partnership also has implications for data centre deployment strategies and this is playing out in markets like Canada. Meanwhile, Google Cloud launched a premium support service and AWS acquired land in Santa Clara that it may well use for more cloud footprint expansion.
While the sector is moving into a period of digestion, when it comes to hyperscale consumption of wholesale data centre capacity, operators continue to build and expand. In recent weeks, we saw activity from the likes of T5 Data Centers, Data Foundry and STACK INFRASTRUCTURE. There were also a number of developments around subsea cables.
In other notable moves, Digital Ocean underwent a workforce reduction and EdgeUno revealed some expansion plans as it looks to help organizations serve end users in Latin America.
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