M&A, all-in bets, cloud usage, earnings, expansions
A number of segments within the sector continued to be busy as earnings season moved into full swing.
On the strategic side, there were a number of notable developments. Earlier last month, VAR/SI/MSP CompuCom was acquired by Office Depot, which made its way into the infrastructure and services game as it looks to capture new opportunities as organizations continue to transition how they run their businesses. In other moves, PlusServer in Germany acquired e-commerce managed hoster Nexinto and Web.com added capabilities targeted at helping SMBs with online advertising through the purchase of a Canadian firm called Acquisio. Still in Canada, ROOT Data Center added more to its financial resources.
Rising cloud adoption is no secret and we continue to come across data points that confirm this trend and point to acceleration. Malaysia Airlines made a big move to Azure, similar to how some enterprises have bet all-in on AWS, and both Microsoft and Amazon have disclosed a number of major cloud customers.
While many organizations are jumping on to cloud for the first time, growth is now increasingly propelled by existing customers. They are expanding existing deployments and moving additional workloads to cloud. AWS shared some insight into this increase in usage on its earnings call and Microsoft also noted some user growth on its earnings disclosure. We start with data points on Office 365 and will have details on Azure next week.
Earnings has moved into full gear and this past week we took a closer look at results from Digital Realty Trust. We also got some insight into how India’s Netmagic is doing in India.
Cloud adoption has propelled data centre growth as providers look to house massive-scale clouds in colocation facilities in strategic markets. But organizations are not just throwing everything on cloud. They are still using colocation, for example, but want to connect with cloud as efficiently as possible, while maintaining high levels of performance. Equinix’s growth is being driven by this value proposition and it opened DC12 on its Ashburn campus. It is not just about capacity, but the proximity to networks and on-boards to clouds. IBM is a cloud provider, but also has an answer to those that want to ‘hybridize’ and still use some colocation while integrating with cloud.
The data centre space continues to grow and infrastructure and clouds remain a driver. QTS is building and acquiring land in Ashburn, vXchgne added a hosting provider tenant in Secaucus and Switch did as well in Vegas. And over in Asia, Colt DCS launched a fifth data centre in Japan.
The managed third party cloud side continues to evolve and we are starting to see signs that an ecosystem is emerging around Oracle. Meanwhile, there are more small shops working on consulting and on-boarding for AWS, speaking to the health and trajectory of this market. There were other interesting developments around cloud infrastructure, with AWS adding HPC-focused EC2 instances and Docker adding support for IBM Cloud for its legacy application migration services.
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