M&A, clouds, big deals, SMB, location, executives
It was another busy week on the M&A front and there were a number of big Internet applications moving to massive-scale clouds. There was also notable activity around backup in the SMB space and earnings season kicked off.
There were a number of transactions this past week on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, the activity primarily revolved around the data centre sector. CyrusOne acquired two wholesale data centres from Sentinel Data Centers, Equinix picked up IO’s London, UK operating business and Cologix brought in a new majority investor as it looks to continue growing and expanding.
Over in the UK, Claranet continues to be very active and acquired a hoster and IT services provider in The Netherlands, while UKFast bought a security firm as it continues its push to the public sector.
Earnings season is underway and most of the sector has yet to report. Amazon, however, went early and its 4Q16 results were very interesting. It is literally still growing like gangbusters, but there has been growth deceleration in the last three quarters and it was most pronounced in this latest reporting period.
Why is AWS showing some signs of slowing? Could it be because the likes of Google and Azure are starting to make life a bit more difficult for AWS? Recent events suggest that might be the case. Google recently closed a deal with Snapchat that will see it spend $400m a year on its cloud. And Evernote, one of Google’s more profile wins of late, just completed its migration to Google’s cloud. Both would have been likely candidates to run on AWS.
The massive-scale clouds are growing relentlessly and hosters and service providers are shifting gears as a result. Rackspace, now a private company, is going to make a big bet on managing third party clouds and made a significant cut to its US-based workforce as it prioritizes new and healthy grow areas within the business.
There was activity on the SMB side of things, particularly around backup. Acronis added Office 365 backup and Dropsuite partnered with Atomia to enable website backups. Elsewhere in the SMB world, Dreamhost released a new site builder.
Data location continues to be a driver of activity. Microsoft launched its Office 365 service in Germany, while MongoDB hoster ScaleGrid confirmed it was running on the AWS cloud in Canada at the request of customers.
The week also saw a number of new hires. Media Temple brought in a new VP of marketing, Rackspace hired a security chief and TierPoint has a new CTO.
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