Cloud, managed third party cloud, SMB, data centres and expansions
It was another busy week highlighted by significant activity around data centres and a number of strategic developments in cloud and SMB hosting.
We’ll start with the managed third party cloud space. As managed hosters continue to shift to the managed third party cloud model for at least part of their operations, building out the on-ramping, planning and consulting piece has been a challenge. As a result, more and more providers are considering M&A to fill this gap. One of the bigger deals we have seen of this kind was announced last week with HOSTING picking up Stelligent Systems.
The ecosystem around managed third party cloud continues to develop. Cloudcheckr is a third party tool used by the likes of Rackspace to power its managed cloud services. Cloudcheckr raised $50m this past week. Meanwhile, more hosters are adding support for two clouds. SingleHop started on Azure last year and now supports AWS. Elsewhere, Baltimore-based Edge Hosting rolled out a new managed AWS service.
IBM Cloud is increasingly of interest to service providers managing third party clouds and last week IBM held its annual Interconnect event in Las Vegas. There were a number of notable developments, including IBM announcing an expansion of its cloud into China. But the narrative was very much focused on the machine learning and analytics capabilities integrated with its cloud infrastructure platform. IBM has very much rounded out its vision and it is all about the value-add that comes on top of cloud, supported by enterprise-grade performance. More details to come.
On the data centre side, there were more capital injections in emerging markets. Ascenty in Brazil and Teraco in South Africa both accessed more resources as they continue to build in the face of steady demand.
There were also the usual building activity. Digital Realty Trust expanded in Atlanta, ViaWest expanded in Las Vegas and Expedient added capacity in Boston. Meanwhile, Amazon continued its ongoing build out with word that it will be building further in Oregon, as well as Dublin, and there are solid indications that it is working on another facility in Singapore. Europe is also seeing more wholesale data centre growth. This past week, we tracked developments from Switzerland and Sweden and the busy Frankfurt market looks to be attracting even more infrastructure.
Not all the big clouds are leasing or building data centres. Some, like Salesforce, are even willing to run on AWS. This past week, Salesforce confirmed it would build out its Australian infrastructure on the AWS cloud.
On the SMB side of things, there was a transaction in the Dutch hosting market and GoDaddy again acquired technology and capabilities with the purchase of a security shop called Sucuri that has some special features for WordPress.
We continue to work through earnings season. China Telecom and China Unicom recently reported and put up impressive growth numbers and on the private company side, Packet in New York shared some data points about its recent progress.
There is little question that the move to cloud and outsourced infrastructure is on. The MSP sector, long focused on on-premise deployments, is now evolving more quickly and we shared an interesting data point that provides some insight into how things are tracking. Uptake of cloud in this part of the sector is moving forward and there is plenty of runway for more.
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