M&A, strategics, CyrusOne, CoreSite, MSP, egress fees, cloud-adjacent storage, expansion, earnings
It was a busy week in M&A that saw a record $25b change hands in two transactions announced on a single day. Elsewhere, there was more development in cloud-adjacent storage services, earnings season continued and there were a number of data centre projects of note.
The two big transactions involved publicly traded operators CyrusOne and CoreSIte. CyrusOne was acquired by long-term investors KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners and CoreSite went to a strategic acquirer in American Tower. We take a closer look at both deals, which speak to the need for the right capital partner depending on what part of the market a provider is playing in. And as we are seeing, this does not always line up with public market status.
There were other transactions of note. On the MSP side, Navisite acquired a Salesforce consultancy as it looks to widen its portfolio, and in the data centre segment, ColoHouse closed a trio of smaller facility acquisitions. There was more technology-oriented M&A in the SMB category, with GoDaddy buying WordPress and WooCommerce provider Pagely and domain registrar Namecheap picked up an online design tool called Stencil.
The last few weeks have seen significant movement in the development of cloud-adjacent storage services. Cloudflare’s R2 and Rackspace’s Data Freedom are two that have recently rolled off the assembly line, while in the past week, Pure Storage partnered with Azure and Equinix to enable a solution oriented around colocation and interconnection. In other product developments, Ntirety rolled out an expanded suite of security capabilities and Akamai partnered with Queue-it for traffic optimization enabled by virtual waiting rooms.
Earnings season continued and we look at results coming from SMB providers GoDaddy and Squarespace, managed cloud and MSP Rackspace, along with CoreSite and Akamai.
Finally, there was more data centre expansion activity. CloudHQ is building a campus in Paris, VIRTUS is active in the UK, Prime Data Centers is set to build in the Chicago area, DataBank is building in NoVA and CoreSite is building in Los Angeles and New York.
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