CEO, Asia-pacific, application layer, legacy, asset-light
It was a very busy week with a number of important developments taking place across various pockets of the sector.
There was more movement in executive circles. In recent weeks, Taylor Rhodes announced he would step down as CEO of Rackspace and Endurance confirmed that it would be looking for a successor to founder and CEO Hari Ravichandran. In the past week, DataBank brought in Raul Martynek as CEO, replacing the outgoing Timothy Moore, and there were more changes at Endurance. Over in Asia, data centre operator 1-Net’s MD departed amid other changes.
A number of other noteworthy developments came out of the Asia-pacific region. On the infrastructure side, Digital Realty opened a new data centre in Osaka, Japan, and is said to be housing a cloud provider there, while Alibaba Cloud is looking for a data centre in Malaysia. Oracle is also building its global footprint and is in the midst of planning an India-based data centre. Meanwhile, on the hosting and cloud side, OVH opened a new HQ in Melbourne.
The sector continues to move away from its roots and straddle more of the application layer. Rackspace, for example, enhanced its application management capabilities, while Symmetry deployed ScienceLogic’s monitoring platform to help its customers gain more insight into what is going on in both the infrastructure and application layers.
Rackspace’s move further up the stack into the application and its developing managed third party cloud business are at the heart of how the sector is changing and it is having a big impact on the way hosters and service providers operate. A good example could be found this past week as word on the street is that Rackspace is considering what to do with a legacy data centre. Given its need for manpower – to power its expanding managed services and consulting portfolio – and the more asset-light orientation (our report on asset-light is here) of its business, it is likely we are going to see it make decisions about this facility accordingly.
Change is also moving providers to focus and be more specialized. This past week saw more on this front as ScaleMatrix introduced a new performance-oriented managed hosting service and UKCloud built an offering for the healthcare sector.
Finally, we continue to look at earnings. We drilled further into the colocation side with details on DuPont Fabros, QTS, GDS and CoreSite.
We published our Hong Kong Data Centre Supply Report for 2017. You can purchase the report or receive an executive summary here or read the press release about it here.
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