Earnings, M&A, managed third party cloud, asset-light, India, APAC
It was a busy week across the sector with earnings season in full swing and a number of important strategic developments.
Industry bellwethers Digital Realty, Equinix and Rackspace reported and all showed steadiness and consistency that speaks to the sector’s resilience coming out of a turbulent year. Global markets continue to push the needle for the data centre segment and were a driver of growth. It is still early globally for Rackspace, but new international markets present significant opportunities that the company is ready to run with.
On the strategic side, there were a number of significant developments that we will be looking at in closer detail in the coming weeks. Cyxtera and Digital Ocean both confirmed intentions to go public, while EdgeConneX and Iron Mountain Data Centres set up joint ventures to enter the burgeoning market in India.
There continues to be M&A activity on the cloud consultancy side. DoIT acquired a shop in Israel and Deloitte targeted the Oracle platform with a deal in APAC. Managed third party cloud continues to drive strategic activity, but is also shaping how providers operate. Rackspace, for example, continues to move to a more asset-light operating model.
There were also more cloud wins of note in APAC. Alibaba Cloud won a number of youngertechnology-oriented firms, while Bank of New Zealand confirmed its commitment to consolidate its data centre footprint to Microsoft Azure.
The past year has clearly demonstrated the underlying value proposition of the infrastructure service sector and nowhere was this more apparent recently than in Texas. The power outages there did not cause any meaningful downtime and colocation providers transitioned seamlessly to backup generators. Not coincidentally, the outages that did happen were at proprietary on-premise data centres.
or