M&A, hyperscale, global markets, appointments, MSP, Canada
It was another busy week that saw a tremendous amount of activity on the M&A side, more hyperscale expansion in global markets, along with a number of notable appointments.
There was a flurry of M&A activity. On the data centre side, LightEdge is now backed by GI Partners and acquired Cavern Technologies to expand its footprint in Kansas, while in Europe, NorthC expanded to Germany through the acquisition of IP Exchange and EXA Infrastructure launched from I Squared Capital’s purchase of GTT”s infrastructure and network assets.
Multiple transactions took place in Canada. On the MSP side, Fully Managed acquired Quartet Services and MSP Corp, a roll-up platform targeted at Canadian MSPs, raised $35m to continue along this path. Meanwhile, real estate investment firms continue to target the data centre space and BentallGreenOak is reported to have completed a pair of sale-leaseback transactions with IBM in Toronto and Montreal.
Meanwhile, there were a number of other deals in the MSP and cloud world. Jungle Disk acquired a trio of backup assets from J2 Global, Claranet made another deal in Portugal and AWS-focused MSPs Caylent and DinoCloud raised growth capital.
The Jungle Disk deal involved bringing in Nick Nelson as CRO and there were other notable hires over the past week. Cloudflare and Ensono both brought in former Rackspace executives and investment firm DigitalBridge hired an industry stalwart as MD.
Hyperscale expansion continues to push on a global basis. AWS confirmed plans to build a new region in New Zealand and Oracle Cloud outlined its plans for EMEA. Oracle is a big user of colocation and so are providers like Cloudflare, which continue to extend the scale and reach of its network.
Finally, there were more expansions in markets of note. DataBank continued with its builds in Salt Lake City, Sparkle is building in Athens, Greece and Sify revealed plans to expand its data centre footprint amid accelerating demand in India. India has drawn a number of new entrants of late and the Digital Realty JV with Brookfield was completed and a CEO named.
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