Public cloud earnings, hyperscale, Europe, MSP, M&A, interconnection
It was another busy week as earnings season got underway with the hyperscale clouds reporting a strong set of results that speaks to the overall resiliency of the sector amid a pandemic environment. We took a closer look at the results coming from AWS and Microsoft Azure. Both continued to show impressive growth and there is the potential that things could accelerate as we move into 2021. Another very interesting development came out of Amazon’s earnings: CEO Jeff Bezos will be stepping down later this year and AWS CEO Andy Jassy will lead the company. Jassy had been AWS’s CEO for quite some time and it will be interesting to see if this changes the odds (however slight for now) AWS might spin out as a separate company.
The growth of public cloud, needless to say, continues to shape the rest of the infrastructure services ecosystem. Hyperscale data centres continue to proliferate globally and this is happening at an accelerated pace. But a lot of the commentary out there is focused on space and building numbers. It gets attention and makes for click bait, but ultimately is not that useful. We look more closely at why.
Public cloud growth has also pushed other providers to create regional services in the face of US dominance. The Europe-focused GAIA-X initiative continues to work on things and France’s Atos and OVH rolled out a new offering that is meant to address some of these growing concerns.
There was some more M&A on the MSP and cloud consulting side. MSP Thrive brought in new investors and Core BTS added another managed Azure shop to bolster its capabilities. This is a sector that continues to be squarely in growth mode and providers continue to make strategic moves to get in position. Rackspace, for example, re-financed its debt to enable growth initiatives.
There were some notable customer wins as well. Digital Crossroad won a CDN client in the Chicago area, while Pulsant and Kao Data in the UK both also won colocation deals.
Finally, the growth of hyperscale is seeing corresponding growth in interconnection nodes. CoreSite lit up a Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect node in Reston and AWS brought online a second Direct Connect node in Italy with Equinix. Megaport was out early with its earnings and not surprisingly saw more top-line growth.
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