APAC, earnings, hyperscale expansion, SAP, sovereign clouds, channel, Local Zones
The week was a busy one with earnings season in full swing, while there was significant activity around hyperscale data centres in APAC, especially in the Philippines, and the development of more sovereign clouds.
A number of public companies reported in the past week and we take a closer look at the results coming from Rackspace and Equinix. Both providers play in different parts of the market, but have tremendous scale – Rackspace is at over $3b in annual revenue and Equinx is over $6b – and both are in the midst of transitioning into next generation growth areas. For Rackspace this is managed public cloud and for Equinix it is interconnection. Meanwhile, on the private company side, Hostpoint in Switzerland shared some data points about its progress in 2021 and Vantage provided an update on its global expansion efforts, while revealing details on a new build in the Frankfurt area.
The APAC region continues to develop and there was more activity around the market in Manila. SpaceDC is set to build a data centre there, while PLDT revealed plans for a large campus-style development. Operators in APAC are increasingly moving into multiple markets as the opportunity around hyperscale expands and Princeton Digital Group is one of them. It closed a $500m equity raise with new investor Mubadala coming on board, along with existing investors. Elsewhere in APAC, Iron Mountain’s JV platform Web Werks is building in Bengaluru, BAM Digital Realty is said to have acquired land and Equinix provided an update on some of its xScale builds in APAC.
There has been more vertical focus across various infrastructure categories and providers are also supporting specific platforms. On the managed public cloud side, SAP is seeing significant momentum as there is still a large installed base still sitting in traditional infrastructure environments. They are ripe for migration to cloud and Lemongrass continues to push in this area and disclosed a new customer win out in Malaysia.
Another directional shift is around compliance and data sovereignty. This is starting to gain momentum in the public cloud arena and in the past week we look at sovereign cloud development in Singapore and Germany. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are involved.
Finally, there was more activity in the channel and we look at a number of AWS Local Zones wins. These wins slant heavily to segments like gaming, esports and online content creation and production. The edge is starting to find its use cases.
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