Earnings, APAC, hyperscale, cloud, Europe, M&A, interconnection
The sector continued to push forward. Earnings season has revealed the underlying strength in the hyperscale and cloud markets, while there were a number of notable developments in Europe, more M&A and a number of new entrants in APAC targeting a continually expanding opportunity.
The hyperscale clouds are showing signs of moving into a growth acceleration phase as pent up demand, continued global expansion and consumption-based usage is pushing the needle. We took at closer look at Google’s results last week and this week, we dig into AWS and Azure. On the alternative or SMB cloud side, Digital Ocean reported a strong quarter that also saw its growth accelerating.
Europe continues to be at the centre of an aggressive cloud build-out and it is quickly reaching out deeper into second tier markets. CyrusOne confirmed the purchase of land in Madrid where it is planning a multi-MW facility. A number of coastal locations are also getting attention as operators try to bridge their connectivity ecosystems with subsea landing cables. We take a closer look at Equinix’s development activity in Bordeaux, France and Genoa, Italy.
There was more strategic developments of note. Cyxtera started trading on the Nasdaq, while there were a number of transactions in the managed hosting and MSP sector. INAP sold off Canadian arm iWeb to Leaseweb, Antin Infrastructure Partners acquired UK-based Pulsant, while Netrality acquired the carrier hotel in Indianapolis.
The growth across the sector continues to attract capital and new operators. We tracked a number of new entrants – Mantra Data Centers (India), DC Matrix (Australia) and Beeinfotech (The Philippines) – targeting various APAC markets. Some will fail to get off the ground, but the fact remains that the digital infrastructure opportunity is large and there is no shortage of interest. Meanwhile, elsewhere in APAC, Digital Realty confirmed a second expansion in the Seoul area and Telstra is converting a pair of internal data centres in Australia into colocation facilities.
There were also developments in the interconnection space. SpaceDC deployed the Epsilon platform, Tencent Cloud partnered with Intercloud, Zenlayer released a new network acceleration service and AT TOKYO launched a network service portal. In the hosting and cloud world, ClearDATA and GoDaddy also introduced interesting new products.
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