M&A, earnings, data centres, Asia-pacific
It was another busy week as earnings season has been in full swing and there was more strategic activity across a number of segments and geographies.
On the earnings side, a number of providers reported results that showed growth propelled by both organic means and M&A. They included Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, Web.com and GoDaddy (details to come). We also took a look at the results of Wix. On the private company side, Switzerland’s Hostpoint shared some data points about its progress and there were some nuggets from NTT’s RagingWire.
Amazon breaks out its cloud infrastructure numbers, while the likes of Google and Microsoft take different approaches when reporting earnings. Google still lumps everything into a large ‘other’ bucket, for example. It did however provide some colour on its progress and shared a paid customer count for G Suite. Meanwhile, we were able to back into Azure’s numbers from Microsoft’s earnings disclosure. Ask us for details and a summary.
This past week we also came across a number of interesting data points that speak to the efficiencies that can be realized through the Internet infrastructure model. Enterprises continue to move to colocation or even make big bets on cloud.
Strategic activity was again plentiful. NTT took on full ownership of RagingWire as it did last year with India’s Netmagic and named a new CEO. On the hosting side, Rackspace spun out the Mailgun acquisition it completed back in 2012 and Wix acquired an online community focused on artists. Meanwhile, In the UK, Blackstone acquired a majority stake in cloud consulting and on-boarding firm Cloudreach and in Australia, Inabox purchased Hostworks. Another transaction was the sale of Korea’s CDNetworks, owned by KDDI. The buyer is said to be ChinaNetCenter. We are looking for more details.
The Cloudreach acquisition was notable as there continues to be activity around shops that have expertise on-boarding and managing the big cloud platforms. The competency is not just in demand in the hosting space. The consulting and outsourcing firms are getting involved and this past week Deloitte, for example, began pushing its hosting and management of SAP on the AWS cloud.
Finally, in Asia-pacific, we saw more expansion activity with PLDT in the Philippines and Microsoft in Korea opening facilities.
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