M&A, cloud growth, AWS, edge, partners
It was another busy week across the sector, with strategic developments, M&A and the start of earnings season.
There were a number of transactions in the sector. On the SMB side, payment provider Square acquired site builder and hoster Weebly for $365m as it looks to consolidate presence and e-commerce capabilities in a single platform and service. On the data centre side, eStruxture continued to expand its Canadian footprint with the addition of a facility in Vancouver. Meanwhile, Madison Dearborn acquired Remote DBA Experts and Aligned Energy brought in a new investor.
The public cloud continues to grow and AWS reported another quarter of revenue growth acceleration. It is on pace to hit well over $20b in revenue this year. But other platforms are gaining steam as well. Netflix has been a poster boy for AWS and this past week it revealed that it had started using Google for certain workloads.
The cloud build out continues and now we are seeing end users work on getting out closer to the edge. The data centre infrastructure has to be there to support it and there are startups looking to make this happen. EdgeMicro is one of these and it raised additional seed funding, while expanding its management team.
Earnings season is underway and we will have more details. QTS drew a lot of attention last quarter when it decided to exit its traditional managed hosting business. In its recent earnings report, QTS confirmed it had found a partner and would start to transition customers.
or