Strategic activity, public clouds, vendors, growth, expansions
It was a bit of a mixed bag, but nevertheless a busy week across the sector.
One of the more notable developments in the previous quarter was Amazon’s introduction of a VPS hosting service that crosses directly into the hosting sector. Alibaba in Asia has now done the same and it uses the terminology of ‘web hosting’ in describing the service.
There has been no shortage of strategic activity lately and that continued in the past week. Late on Friday, there were a number of media outlets reporting on the possible Vantage Data Centers sale. No confirmations or official disclosures are out there, but Digital Bridge is said to be the acquirer. In other developments, Faction in Denver raised $11m, H5 acquired a data centre in Cleveland that was previously owned by ByteGrid and in China, OpenStack service provider EasyStack raised $50m in a Series C. In the Asia-pacific region, Australia’s Blue Central was transacted yet again.
The early part of the year often sees private company disclosures. Both the service provider and vendor sides provide insight. Faction shared some data points on its progress and Veeam’s growth has been pushed to a large extent by steady progress in the service provider channel. Meanwhile, earnings season is set to kick off and GoDaddy provided preliminary 4Q16 results.
Elsewhere, there were a number of notable US-based expansions. TierPoint is expanding in Franklin, TN, there is more activity around Ashburn, VA, NJFX completed its New Jersey data centre and in France, Euclyde opened its Lyon, France facility.
On the hosting side, there was movement in product development. Digital Ocean and HOSTING were focused on monitoring and Carrenza on storage.
Finally, the move to cloud continues with organizations moving directly to massive-scale, but also doing it through the help of third party service providers.
or