Cloud, third party cloud, data centres, expansions, results
It was another busy week across the sector with significant activity around cloud and a number of notable data centre expansions.
AWS has seen some deceleration in its growth rates, but that is relative and it continues to grow at a extremely healthy clip. Amazon clearly wants as much of the pie as possible. But in order to get it, it must widen the universe of use cases it can address. Late in 2016, it targeted ‘traditional’ hosting scenarios with a new VPS hosting service and just this past week, it rolled out a unified communications service.
We posited last week that Amazon might be starting to feel some impact from the likes of Google as they get in and even win some of the bigger opportunities that are out there. Last week, Snapchat decided on Google’s cloud, but this week it confirmed choosing AWS for backup infrastructure to the tune of $1b. So it might not be hurting as badly.
The ecosystem around cloud continues. Recently, we’ve seen SingleHop and Synoptek get into managed third party cloud and we spoke with another provider that shared some interesting insights into where managed third party cloud customers are coming from.
Cloud footprints continued to expand. Alibaba Cloud is adding capacity in Hong Kong and OVH is building another US-based data centre. We mentioned Amazon’s VPS service, which competes against the likes of Linode and Digital Ocean. Both were active lately with Linode adding more instance sizes and Digital Ocean releasing a new load balancing feature.
Elsewhere, there was a healthy amount of activity on the data centre side of things. Switch opened its data centre in Reno, Nevada, Colt is expanding in London, Alibaba is expanding in Hong Kong and Equinix is expanding in a number of global locations.
Cloud continues to be a growth driver for colocation, particularly at the wholesale level. But cloud is not just a driver from the standpoint of just strictly tenancy. Salesforce is now available on the Equinix Cloud Exchange and organizations can directly connect to it – driving interconnection revenue for Equinix and contributing positively to the overall value proposition of the ecosystem that lives within Equinix’s footprint.
Earnings season is underway and we are looking at the results over the next few weeks. We have some details on Web.com and last week, AWS. On the private side, we got a chance to speak with DATA4 in France and Dropbox continues on its aggressive trajectory.
Finally, there was more strategic activity. In Australia, AirTrunk completed its funding round as it builds a number of wholesale data centres in Australia. Meanwhile, Green Cloud acquired a fellow cloud wholesaler and the regulatory authorities gave the green light for the United Internet acquisition of Strato.
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