M&A, Canada, Equinix, Packet, edge, managed third party cloud
It was a busy week across the sector with M&A at the forefront.
Equinix acquired Bell Canada’s data centre portfolio as it looks to build a pan-Canadian footprint. The deal bolsters Equinix’s presence in Toronto and adds assets that put Montreal and Vancouver on the map. Western Canada has particularly interesting potential for Equinix’s portfolio and we have details. Also in Canada, Beanfield Metroconnect acquired metro network assets from Aptum.
There were also a number of strategic developments in the managed third party cloud space. Effectual and Navisite made acquisitions of AWS-focused shops and in APAC, Bespin Global raised $75m in a Series C round.
Pan-regional platforms and telco carve-outs were themes of the Equinix acquisition. In APAC, we had a chance to speak with a newly established operator in Singapore –Princeton Digital Group – that is building a pan-Asian data centre platform, with telco carve-outs part of its larger strategy. Princeton Digital Group is already operating in Singapore, Indonesia, China and India.
The pandemic environment continues to impact operators and we have some feedback from an MSP, while IBM shared some insights on its recent earnings call. Meanwhile, Zoom’s recent earnings showed just how explosive some of its growth has been.
The week also saw significant expansion activity on the hyperscale side from the likes ofAligned and STACK in the US and Scala and Ascenty in South America.
Finally, edge, CDN and interconnection nodes continue to go global and both Megaportand AWS were actively deploying.
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