M&A, SMB, SAP, APAC, DevOps, new entrants, Canada, Poland
Another busy week across the sector was marked by a significant volume of global activity with multiple developments in various markets of interest. There was also notable M&A and strategic activity.
Starting with M&A, KKR acquired Ensono from its existing investors, while completing a second managed public cloud shop. There were also a pair of transactions by Canadian providers on the hosting and cloud side. MSP Pythian acquired an SAP-focused service provider and HostPapa continued to consolidate web hosters and picked up Silicon Valley Web Hosting. SAP was also the focus of Syntax’s (also a Canadian company) acquisition of Linke in Spain. There were other strategic SMB hosting developments of note. In Europe, One.com acquired a WordPress plugin and site builder Squarespace, after recently acquiring Tock, will directly list on the NYSE. Squarespace has scale and continues to grow steadily. Finally, on the data centre side, we saw a new entrant in the Oklahoma City area launch, Russia’s Linxdatacenter took on new investors and APG acquired a minority stake in Hong Kong-based provider OneAsia.
The APAC region was particularly busy in the past week. In Indonesia, Salim Group recently partnered to use Google Cloud, while Biznet confirmed plans to build a third data centre in the greater Jakarta region. On the MSP and cloud side, there were a pair of notable appointments. Cloudflare hired a former AWS executive based in Singapore to lead the APAC region and Intermedia brought in a country president in Japan where it has a new strategic partnership with NEC. Google Cloud has made progress in Southeast Asia and Microsoft is targeting the region as well. It has already confirmed plans to build in-country data centre infrastructure for its services in Indonesia and now Malaysia.
A few markets saw multiple developments. Cloudflare set up its new Canadian offices in Toronto and Toronto-based MSP CentriLogic named a new COO. In Poland, Beyond.pl boosted connectivity at its Poznan campus and Google Cloud opened its cloud infrastructure region in Warsaw – the first of many hyperscale deployments to come.
On the managed third party cloud side, things continue to move forward. The market is maturing and it is a matter of time before the business and operating models evolve along with it. A step in that direction was introduced by Rackspace as it looks to bring a new managed services and support delivery model for managed third party cloud customers. The model builds on the old, while accommodating the new.
Finally, the investor calculus in the space is also changing. We comment on the implications of the recent arrest of a Texas man for plotting to blow up an AWS data centre. Not a fun topic, but one worth considering from both an investment and operational perspective.
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