COVID-19, M&A, Canada, UI, strategic developments
The sector continues to show clear signs of resilience across the board as a highly anticipated earnings season is set to kick off. There are sure to be some very interesting insights about the impact of the pandemic.
The COVID-19 outbreak continues to impact infrastructure usage and in some cases, it is leading to a loosening in data sovereignty regulations. In Canada, the BC provincial government relaxed in-country hosting requirements so that public sector entities can find the right infrastructure as they run up against more urgent timelines and demand profiles.
There was also more M&A activity of note. On the edge side, Utah’s IE Corporation pushed further into digital infrastructure and data centres with the purchase of Baselayer, a builder of edge and modular data centres and software management tools. The addition of strategic capabilities continues to fuel M&A in the MSP space. Toronto’s CentriLogic was the latest to acquire public cloud consulting and application development capabilities with the acquisition of ObjectSharp, a Microsoft-focused shop that just happens to literally be in its backyard.
There was other activity in Canada as Oracle Cloud launched a second Canadian region in Montreal. Oracle continues to expand its cloud footprint globally and provided a quick update to its roadmap, while AWS opened up its new South Africa region.
Back to the strategic side of things, there is reporting that Rackspace is again looking at the possibility of an IPO. The increased attention on the cloud and infrastructure market, amid the pandemic, may have played a role here in the timing.
The COVID-19 outbreak continues to impact various facets of the Internet infrastructure business. We’ve seen the surges in capacity that have caused places like Europe to see unprecedented traffic flows. But in a world that is heavily locked down, remote tools become all that more important as end users look for ways to procure, monitor and manage services remotely. QTS released some very interesting data points about the sharp increase in usage of its customer portal. QTS has made a number of investments here and it is paying off in this new environment. Customer portals are now the predominant interface and point of contact between customers and providers. And they have quickly become places where real differentiation can be built.
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