M&A, managed public cloud, hyperscale, global expansions, on-premise migrations
It was another busy week across the sector, with various strategic developments, movement in the managed public cloud market, data centre expansions in global markets and continued movement from the ‘old world’ to the new.
On the strategic side, VPLS took on more equity capital and acquired a data centre operation in Dallas, Texas as it continues to expand its footprint. Over in the UK, Digital 9 acquired London-based operator Volta and in APAC, Australia’s Edge Centres secured a Series A round to build data centres in Malaysia. Equinix continues to push into global markets and we got some additional perspective on its recent acquisitions in Chile and Peru. Meanwhile, Sungard AS filed for bankruptcy in the UK, US and Canada as it looks to restructure amid recent struggles.
The ecosystem around public cloud continues to expand and we have data points from DoIT International and Pythian. DoIT is pushing forward in EMEA and Pythian is making progress with SAP on public cloud. Public cloud growth continues and Google was the latest to release details on its expansion efforts. The top of the market continues to separate itself from hyperscale pretenders. IBM Cloud is consolidating its footprint and closing down data centres as it looks to become a more targeted infrastructure platform, while embracing multi-cloud. But as IBM Cloud looks for a different path forward, AWS continues to push the needle and Andy Jassy pointed to a number of the reasons how it reached this point in an annual letter to shareholders.
Data centre expansion continues in line with hyperscale and overall managed infrastructure growth. There was activity in a number of global markets such as Nigeria, the UAE, Vietnam, Greece, Ireland and Germany, while new builds were confirmed by Sabey Data Centers in Austin and Aligned Data Centers in Chicago.
Finally, there continues to be movement from on-premise environments to outsourced infrastructure. The London Stock Exchange is migrating from proprietary data centres and we spoke with some providers that are seeing on-premise data centres move or fold as a result of commercial real estate decisions amid the emerging post-pandemic environment.
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