M&A, strategics, edge, micro data centre, earnings, cloud wins
It was another busy week with a number of transactions in the managed third party cloud space, developments in edge computing and more insights on the impact of the pandemic on earnings.
Strategic buyers continue to hunt for consultancies and MSPs with public cloud expertise. Cognizant has ratcheted up its M&A activity in this area and picked up New Signature to help build its Microsoft cloud practice. The Microsoft ecosystem continues to flourish and there are roll-ups developing in this space like 3Cloud, which recently acquired a Microsoft shop called Applied Cloud Systems. Elsewhere in M&A, PS Lightwave added a data centre in Houston and Vantage closed its purchase of NGD.
Still on the strategic side, Rackspace went public last week and had a sluggish opening day.
The edge remains a bit in the background, but pieces continue to be assembled. American Tower’s acquisition of Colo Atl flew under the radar, but the edge strategy it is building is coming into focus. It partnered with EdgePresence to deploy a micro data centre in Atlanta and plans to take this template to other markets. EdgePresence is also supporting bare metal hoster DediPath as it builds out smaller locations with targeted infrastructure for edge-oriented workloads.
The pandemic remains front and centre and is impacting the earnings of infrastructure providers. AWS and Akamai both felt some of the negative impact, but managed to push through and continue to perform even at higher levels of scale.
Finally, there were a number of wins across multiple segments and geographies. TikTok is said to be running on Google Cloud, while Google also won Deutsche Bank. Meanwhile, Minecraft completed its move from AWS to Azure, Atos secured oustourcing and managed services contract extensions, Wipro won deals in Europe and Rackspace won a managed third party cloud customer in EMEA.
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