Massive-scale clouds, M&A, Google, managed third party cloud
It was a somewhat slower week, though there was yet more activity around massive-scale clouds.
Google had its cloud event in early March and new products and partnerships continue to roll out. This past week, we look at its new partnerships with Veritas and SAP as it continues to target the enterprise market. We also have a few more details about its impending infrastructure footprint expansion. Google chose Montreal for its first Canada-based cloud zone and is the latest massive-scale platform to go there – over Toronto – for its underlying cost advantages.
The other clouds were busy and it somewhat quietly emerged that Amazon had acquired another startup. The latest – Do.com – will be integrated with the new unified communications platform Chime. Amazon, as we know, continues to grow, and it has plans for another major expansion in Dublin. Meanwhile, Azure also like Google, partnered with Veritas, in addition to rolling out new big data features for its government sector-focused offerings.
The managed third party cloud and direct connection segments were also active. Datapipe confirmed another managed AWS win from the financial services sector and Colt introduced direct connection services for AWS and Azure. Financial services organizations – traditionally a reluctant crowd – continue to move to cloud and HSBC was the latest.
We continue to work on earnings season results, but on the private company side, we received some feedback from Denver-based Faction, which has shown steady growth and recently secured some patents for its cloud-agnostic hybrid capabilities, enabled by networking software. Elsewhere, CenturyLink has been working to enable multi-cloud capabilities of its own and introduced a new management platform called Cloud Application Manager.
The strategic side was quiet, but we do have a few more details about the recent ChinaNetCenter acquisition of CDNetworks and Russia’s CDNVideo.
or