M&A, Europe, Canada, verticals, hyperscale, wholesasle
It was another busy week across the sector. There was continued M&A activity, while Europe and Canada again saw important developments.
On the M&A side, strategic acquirers were busy. Storage vendor NetApp acquired Spot, a software tool for optimizing public cloud consumption, while in Europe, Deloitte added to its managed AWS practice with the acquisition of Irish consultancy DNM. Meanwhile, FiberLight continues to consolidate fibre and infrastructure assets in the northeast. It recently acquired BestWeb and TruePath Technologies.
It was relatively quiet elsewhere in the strategic arena, but there continues to be chatter around Rackspace positioning for an IPO later this year.
Rackspace is undergoing a big shift in its business as it moves to becoming more of a MSP and integrator. Other cloud and hosting services are similarly transforming and that often means specialization and vertical focus. We recently saw OVH expand its healthcare-focused private cloud, Verne Global in Iceland raised $27m to help push its HPC offerings and AWS rolled out a new line of EC2 instances geared for HPC workloads and powered by its new chip technology. We also had a chance to speak with Canadian infrastructure provider AMPD in Vancouver that is focused on the gaming and digital media sectors.
Canada continues to see movements in the market. Earlier this month, Equinix acquired the Bell Canada data centre assets and Compass is building in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, presumably for a hyperscale provider. Demand continues to drive expansions and ServerFarm just finished an upgrade to its Toronto facility as it gets set to welcome a new wholesale tenant.
The wholesale market continues to drive primary markets in Europe and Frankfurt has seen steady activity. Iron Mountain is the latest to land a large customer and signed a 27MW pre-lease. It also shared details about its expansions in London and Amsterdam.
The US data centre market continues to see a constantly shifting landscape. Evoque entered 18 months ago through the acquisition of AT&T’s data centre assets and now has a new CEO. Meanwhile, Agile Data Sites re-branded as DataBridge Sites.
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