M&A, capital raises, third party cloud wins, data centres, site builders
Another busy week was marked by more strategic developments and accelerating activity around managed third party cloud services.
DataBank has been active in recent weeks with the acquisition of C7 Data Centers in Utah. This past week, it acquired a pair of data centres that will serve as gateways into new markets: Pittsburgh and Cleveland. The data centres were purchased from 365 Data Centers. Meanwhile, Lumos Networks acquired Charlotte, NC-based DC74 to expand its footprint in the Atlantic region. DataBank is not likely to be done yet as various media outlets are reporting on DataBank’s possible acquisition of Vantage Data Centers.
In other transactions, we saw a small deal in Australia with VentraIP picking up Web Access, and in the US, compliance-focused hoster Netgain confirmed a $25m private equity investment.
There was more activity in managed third party cloud. Asia-pacific has been somewhat slow in adopting this model, but things are starting to pick up and Rackspace won a managed AWS customer in Thailand. In the US, TierPoint added indirect go-to-market capabilities for managed Azure and in the UK and Europe, Claranet opened a new location in Italy that is going to be focused primarily on its managed third party cloud offerings.
There continues to be a steady rate of adoption for the big clouds. Teradata is running on Azure, the US Army will deploy on IBM’s cloud platform and AWS continues to pick up wins at a steady pace. But the ‘traditional’ world remains consistent. Even as Rackspace pushes towards third party clouds, it continues to win private cloud and bare metal customers – still the primary growth driver for managed hosters.
The growth of cloud has sparked a surge in the wholesale data centre market and there are hotbeds emerging in Canada – primarily the Montreal market. The growth continues to draw investment interest and we came across a platform that is in development.
The SMB side of the game was relatively quiet, but we saw more vertically-focused tools being built into site builders – Weebly being the latest – and the move beyond plain vanilla web presence to online marketing platforms – GoDaddy the latest with a new offering – continues. Meanwhile, Web.com’s Donweb, which it recently acquired, suffered an outage.
An outage also hit the enterprise market as Delta Airlines had its second major incident in recent months. Delta and many other airlines remain wedded to old IT models and it should be a matter of time before events like this trigger a move to outsourced third party models.
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