Europe, edge, Rackspace, APAC, M&A
It was a busy week across the sector with new company formation and an industry mainstay set to return to the public markets.
New company formation is about high levels of growth and increasingly targeted technology and capabilities. On the growth side, Europe continues to be at the centre of the current hyperscale expansion phase and we are starting to see more activity in the next tier of markets after FLAP. KevlinX is the latest to enter the market and it is targeting Brussels, Belgium. On the hosting and cloud side, some industry veterans started up a new managed WordPress service called Rocket that automates performance and security and pushes all of this to the edge.
The edge continues to evolve and Dartpoints recently brought online a new data centre in eastern Iowa as it looks to target underserved markets with a somewhat downsized version of a tried and tested model.
Rackspace, of course, is a familiar name with a long history. It went private back in 2016, but confirmed what the rumour mill has been saying as it filed its S-1. We have a few details.
There was plenty of activity in APAC. New company formation was a theme this past week, but in Asia, we have seen organizations transition over to data centre from industries like real estate and logistics. There are also holders of assets that are transforming to a digital world. Singapore Press Holdings entered into a JV with Keppel to convert some of its infrastructure assets to data centres. Meanwhile, there was yet more land acquisition in Hong Kong as China Mobile purchased a site in Hong Kong’s Fotan district. Cloud uptake continues to be a big driver of expansion in APAC and US-based Vultr and Singapore-based MSPs Cloud4C entered the South Korea market.
Elsewhere in APAC, we saw RackBack sign an MoU to build hyperscale sites and AIMS is building in the Kuala Lumpur area in Malaysia. On the interconnection side, Equinix expanded its Alibaba Cloud interconnection footprint, while Console Connect was brought online in Australia.
The M&A arena was relatively slow, but we saw another deal from Europe-based SMB provider team.blue and Landmark Dividend closed another sale-leaseback transaction.
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