M&A, technology, executives, partnerships, managed third party cloud
It was another busy week highlighted by more strategic activity on the cloud and hosting side and a pair of high-profile departures at leading providers.
There were a number of notable deals that speak to two strategic directions: 1) the hosting sector continues to consolidate; and 2) providers continue to invest and acquire technology in an effort to differentiate and push growth. Internap’s acquisition of SingleHop had all these elements. SingleHop is comparable to previous Internap acquisitions of Voxel and iWeb and brings an automation platform and technology capabilities that Internap plans to productize and bring to market. Meanwhile, Total Server Solutions acquired ZeroLag and raised some growth capital. Liquid Web is another consolidator in the hosting space, but its latest deal adds technology and expertise. It purchased a WordPress plugin provider called iThemes.
The first few months of the year usually sees quite a bit of movement in executive circles. The past week saw some very high profile departures. Equinix CEO Steve Smith, who has led the company for over a decade, resigned, while long-time Rackspace veteran and CTO John Engates confirmed that he would be leaving Rackspace after almost two decades at the company.
The data centre market continues to be an increasingly global one. Customers are asking for more locations and in geographies that span the globe. In recent weeks, we saw CyrusOne partner up and make a strategic investment in GDS to reach Asia and vXchnge and Colt have done something similar and partnered up to help customers expand to geographies where they do not have presence and footprint.
The managed third party cloud market was somewhat quiet, but Codero was the latest hoster to get into this service line. And related to this, Spotinst partnered with Samsung’s IT services arm to enable Samsung to deliver cloud infrastructure services to enterprises off excess capacity on AWS, Azure and other hyperscale clouds.
Finally, the vendor side continues to shift towards enabling service providers and their infrastructure service offerings. NetApp hired a GM for its developing cloud infrastructure business unit.
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