Coronavirus, Zoom, Netflix, managed third party cloud, edge, SMB
The past week again put Internet infrastructure in the spotlight as work from home and physical distancing continues to drive Internet traffic to unprecedented levels. Zoom has been one of the big beneficiaries and they shared some interesting data points about how it is dealing with the demand. The pace at which it is expanding also forced publicly listed Zoom to update its risk profile in its filings. Netflix is another platform seeing a massive surge in usage and it also shared insights on how it is scaling its infrastructure.
Zoom and Netflix both run on hyperscale clouds and they are inevitably seeing growth as evidenced by some of the eye-opening data points that Microsoft disclosed about Azure. and the apparent capacity limits it might be reaching in Australia. Data centre operators are a part of this value chain as well. They are housing some of the cloud regions that run these applications and house the content, while in the case of Equinix, facilitating interconnections. Equinix is hosting the cloud, but is very much still a brick and mortar business in that customers enter its facilities to house and manage infrastructure. In hard-hit Europe, Equinix has put in new restrictions on access and pushed customers to remote hands services.
The cloud is also running workloads for mid-sized organizations and MSPs are managing it. Mission is using CloudHealth to bolster its suite of services and others like Lightstreamare using CloudCheckr to get into managed third party cloud services.
The SMB market also saw activity in the past week. There was an acquisition in Europe, while Squarespace and Flywheel rolled out new products and services.
There was more activity in edge. Limelight shared some insights about its edge compute rollout and StackPatch partnered with Broadcom amid a management change.
Finally, there was some strategic activity amid the slowdown. TierPoint raised $320m in equity financing and Penta Infra acquired a data centre asset in Germany.
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