SMB, M&A, partnerships, APAC, LatAm, cloud
The sector has picked up the pace of late and there are no signs of things slowing down.
The SMB space was again a busy one. In a highly consolidated market there are still transactions from time to time and HostPapa in Canada acquired long-time provider Lunarpages. A lot of the other activity in the SMB sphere involved partnerships and channels. Hostopia will be a preferred provider of hosting and email services to the Ingram Micro distribution channel, Web.com will resell Office 365 and Dreamhost will resell G Suite. On the vendor side, cPanel integrated its platform with Alibaba Cloud.
Other notable partnerships included EdgeConneX and Lume and AVANT and Webair.
The data centre market continues to grow and there were a number of developments of note in Singapore and other markets around the world. Starhub confirmed it is a customer at AirTrunk’s new Singapore facility and Iron Mountain officially opened up its Singapore data centre. Elsewhere, MC Digital Realty acquired a plot of land in Inzai, outside Tokyo, and Cologix confirmed it acquired more expansion capacity in Montreal.
On the hyperscale side, AWS is reported to be looking at Argentina for its second location in Latin America.
Oracle Cloud is pushing harder these days and it has talked about private data centres (with potential positive impact on third party colocation providers), expanded its interconnection and multi-cloud capabilities and partnered with Deloitte. Meanwhile, markets like Canada continue to develop and a Microsoft executive made some interesting remarks about the current state of cloud adoption in the country.
Finally, there has been significant shuffling in executive circles. Equinix brought in a new CTO, Pivotree has a new COO and UKFast hired a CMO.
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