Hyperscale, global expansions, earnings, Brexit, M&A
Hyperscale continues to expand and the global cloud build out has pushed all parts of the ecosystem into international frontiers.
The hyperscale clouds continue to add to their footprints. Google was the latest to confirm details about its next phase of expansion. And in three of the countries it is expanding in, the new region will be a second location. Like Osaka and Tokyo in Japan, in many countries there are now two hyperscale markets. In APAC, Jakarta is an important emerging market and there are reports that Microsoft will join Alibaba, Google and AWS in the Indonesian market.
Meanwhile, global data centre expansion drove the earnings of Equinix and Digital Realty acquired more land in Frankfurt for future expansion. MSPs were also active internationally. Rackspace opened up operations in Dubai and Ori Industries partnered to expand on EdgeConneX’s European edge data centre footprint.
The completion of Brexit has not had any immediate impact, but that will change perhaps sooner than later. The first sign of change could be the differences in data sovereignty and privacy laws between the EU and UK. Will the UK’s laws be preferable for some and drive opportunity for providers in the UK? This will be fascinating to watch play out.
Earnings season continues to push forward. Along with Equinix, we took a closer look at results from Switch, Australia’s NEXTDC and SMB provider Wix. Oracle’s cloud results were a bit uneventful.
There was some M&A on the SMB side. CloudScale365 picked up eApps Hosting and European provider Miss Group secured a private equity investment. Elsewhere, hyperscale clouds continue to use M&A to widen their capabilities. Google made an interesting acquisition recently, acquiring a company that can help get mainframe computers ready for cloud. It is another example of Google’s pivot to the enterprise market.
Finally, there was some shuffling in executive circles as Fastly and Epsilon brought on new CEOs.
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