M&A, LatAm, bare metal, realignment, legacy clouds, managed public cloud, storage
The sector moved back into gear and the past week was highlighted by M&A across a number of different categories, while new products rolled off the assembly line and managed third party cloud providers continue to build momentum by creating more specialization and focus.
M&A was quiet towards the end of the year, but things have started to pick up. Aligned Data Centers entered a new region through the acquisition of ODATA and on the cloud side, Aptum Technologies picked up Montreal-based CloudOps to augment its managed public cloud and DevOps capabilities. Elsewhere in cloud and managed infrastructure, Hivelocity acquired a smaller provider and VAZATA divested its managed infrastructure assets to focus on data centre colocation. The realignment of assets, often seeing a transition away from legacy to next-generation offerings, continues to be a primary feature of the M&A landscape.
The shift in the competitive landscape continues to impact those that acquired cloud infrastructure platforms in a bid to compete in the public cloud space. IBM continues to de-emphasize public cloud and Dell Technologies recently shuttered the Virtustream business. Virtustream was a first-generation enterprise cloud infrastructure services acquired by EMC back in 2015 to push into cloud services. That initiative also looks to have come to an end.
The fate of platforms like IBM Cloud and Virtustream and intertwined with the reasons why managed public cloud services have been on the rise. 2nd Watch continues to show momentum here, particularly with AWS, and shared some interesting data points about its progress, while Logicworks has increasingly shifted to a focus on security.
Finally, there were some interesting new product developments. OVHcloud introduced a bare metal cloud service called Metal Instances and VMware rolled out Cloud Flex Storage.
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