M&A, SMB, geographic expansion, earnings
The past week saw a number of strategic developments, while the build out of service provider infrastructure on a global basis continued.
On the strategic side, the week saw the official announcement of the Vantage acquisition by Digital Bridge. Digital Bridge adds a wholesale colocation play to the portfolio and Vantage, like DataBank (also acquired by Digital Bridge), will continue to run under the same branding and management team.
There were other deals of interest. There continues to be interest in cloud consulting firms with AWS expertise and the buyers are not just managed hosters. The bigger consulting firms are building cloud practices and this past week Deloitte purchased a Virginia-based shop called Day1 Solutions. The mid-market remains a focus for investors and a PE firm we recently came across – FlatWorld Capital – added Chicago’s NetSource Communications to its infrastructure hosting and managed services platform. Meanwhile, on the SMB side, United Internet acquired a minority stake in online marketing platform rankingCoach.
The SMB side of the sector continues to evolve and managed third party cloud is increasingly a part of that story. Ingram Micro’s Odin platform now enables Azure for hosters and service providers and Microsoft continues to see success in this channel as it evolves to this new asset-light delivery model. Backup is another important part of the SMB game and Acronis set up another partnership with an automation platform.
Geographic expansion continues. Cloudflare, Psychz Networks and ManagedWay were service providers that added new locations, while IBM partnered with Wanda Group to push its cloud into China. Another big partnership was confirmed in the space. Verizon will sell Equinix’s colocation and interconnection services to its enterprise customer base as it tries to bundle network and security on its side with infrastructure services.
Earnings season is coming to a close and we took a look at two more providers. United Internet in Germany reported and so did Bulletproof in Australia. The Bulletproof results were interesting as they provide a window to how things are tracking in the managed third party cloud/consulting world. Bulletproof also recently added managed Azure to its managed AWS services.
or