Earnings, Asia-pacific, cloud switches, multi-cloud, cloud shops
Activity across the sector continues to be steady.
Earnings season is drawing to a close, but we have more results coming from the APAC region, including Alibaba Cloud, China Telecom and China Unicom. In Europe, we took a closer look at SMB-oriented United Internet, and also on the SMB side, GoDaddy reported a steady quarter as well. We also looked at results from QTS and Zayo.
The strategic activity around managed third party cloud has picked up pace in recent weeks. Cloudreach in the UK completed two acquisitions earlier this month and Pulsant got into the act and acquired an AWS shop called LayerV.
Another prominent theme in the past week was the movement between clouds. We saw a customer leave AWS, for example, and two went over to Google. Meanwhile, multi-cloud approaches continue to be increasingly common.
There was more activity coming out of the SMB side of the sector. GoDaddy introduced SmartLine and Dropsuite expanded its partnership with Ingram Micro. Meanwhile, SMBs hosting online shops continue to increase the amount of business they conduct online and Weebly shared a data point that bears out this point. Elsewhere in the SMB market, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving confirmed he would be stepping down as CEO at the end of the year.
Another interesting development was a new partnership regional MSP called Onix established with Dropbox. Dropbox appears to be closing in on a level of critical mass that will spawn an ecosystem of value-add that service providers and MSPs are going to be primed to tap into.
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