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M&A, cloud results, managed public cloud, IPOs, hyperscale, APAC, Europe

  • September 27, 2021
  • Analyst: Philbert Shih

Another busy week saw M&A activity, hyperscale expansions in APAC, managed public cloud developments and wide ranging strategic activity around IPOs and new company and investment platform formation.

Earnings seasons has concluded and we take a closer look at a number of useful data points coming out of Oracle and VMware’s results. For VMware, the data points speak to the overall health of cloud infrastructure, while for Oracle, there was more OCI growth and some interesting commentary on how Oracle views deployment of data centre CapEx.

The managed public cloud space continues to be part of the ecosystem-wide growth in hyperscale. Seattle’s 2nd Watch shared some useful data points that highlight its momentum, while Lemongrass disclosed metrics on SAP uptake of public cloud.

It continues to be busy on the M&A front. Element Critical recently acquired a data centre in Austin, TexasGI Partners acquired LightEdgeColoHouse bought Lume Cloud and Liquid Web picked up another WordPress plugin technology. The M&A activity extended to the UK, where Proximity Data Centres acquired a data centre in Swindon.

The strategic arena remained busy. OVH in France reiterated its intentions of going publicand revealed insights into its growth trajectory. Meanwhile, Intermedia in the US appears to be trying again after pulling its IPO earlier this year. The fillings also included colour on its 1H21 performance. On the investment side, Digital 9 is eyeing more deals and Strategic Capital Fund Management in the US set up a dedicated investment platform for data centres.

The burgeoning opportunity in APAC is drawing in a wave of investors and operators looking to tap into the long-term upside of the market. A few new entrants are still in stealth mode, but made moves, while in Europe, a new edge and hyperscale play  – AtlasEdge – is coming out of Europe.

Elsewhere in Europe, there was activity in the UK around possible hyperscale self-builds while a sovereign cloud is in development in Germany through a partnership between T-Systems and Google Cloud. And finally, there was more cloud footprint expansion in Europe. Vultr brought online a node in Sweden and IBM is set to build a new region in Madrid, Spain.

The hyperscale market in APAC continues to expand. We look at some recent developments in the Jakarta market and STT GDC launched its first data centre in Bangkok, Thailand.

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