Earnings, hyperscale, cloud, social media, channel, private company growth
It was another busy week as earnings season is in full swing now. We finish off our look at the hyperscale cloud segment with Google and Alibaba. Google revealed a bit more about the state of its cloud business. Clarity into the revenue mix was not available, but Google provided useful hints while also confirming that the cloud arm is far from profitable. Alibaba Cloud, on the other hand, has now reached EBITA positive.
Public cloud growth continues and Oracle Cloud provided an update on its expanding global footprint and there were details about planned new regions and the OCI-Azure interoperability nodes. Public cloud adoption continues to diversify and the likes of Twitter is using Google Cloud for analytics, while recently making a strong commitment to AWS.
Hyperscale is not the only driver of infrastructure expansion as we saw with France’s OVHcloud adding more capacity in APAC.
The data centre sector continues to follow hyperscale cloud growth. Bolstered by more M&A, Vantage Data Centers is pursuing the opportunity in Canada and Europe, while Chindata and NTT GDC are building and expanding in Malaysia, Teraco is expanding further in South Africa and Amazon is working on more infrastructure in the UK.
Private companies like to share some data points this time of year as they reflect on the year just completed. Master agent AVANT shared some metrics on its Zoom partnership and managed third party cloud shop Lemongrass showed healthy growth in 2020.
There was also strategic activity of note. Akamai acquired a security company, IBM purcchased a cloud consultancy, SMB platform Webflow raised a Series B and Rostelecom Data Centres in Russia took on a strategic investor.
Finally, this time of year also sees a lot of executive shuffles. Flexential named a new SVP of marketing, while consultancies Lemongrass and DoiT International added industry veterans to their executive teams that come with longstanding experience in the Internet infrastructure ecosystem.
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