M&A, strategic, third party cloud, outages, appointments
It was a relatively slower week as the US market was less active due to the Memorial Day long weekend.
Strategic activity around managed third party cloud continues to be a recurring theme. This past week, ServerCentral in Chicago completed a strategic investment in a cloud consultancy as it looks to build out support for third party clouds. There was also M&A activity coming out of the UK as The Hut Group acquired SMB hoster UK2 Group and Claranet completed three acquisitions (details forthcoming). Meanwhile, there is chatter that Web.com could be considering some strategic options of its own.
Outages were another prominent theme. British Airways IT systems went down and caused chaos for travellers, while Office 365 went offline in the Asia-pacific region. BA’s outage was the second major airline outage in the last several months and speaks to a lot of the shortcomings with traditional IT infrastructure deployment models and the lack of and weakness of disaster recovery deployments. But other industries, like financial services, are getting on board with cloud and we have a few details about ANZ Bank in Australia and its cloud strategy.
Another area that continues to develop is direct connections. The past week saw a number of providers – CoreSite, Equinix and Cologix – roll out interconnection services for the public clouds.
Meanwhile, there was also more movement in executive circles. Rackspace hired a new president for its managed hosting and private cloud business arm and Contegix added a familiar name to its board. And the cloud build out continued with IBM and Google (details forthcoming) expanding in Australia and Oregon, while COLO-D deployed massive-scale customers at its second Montreal-area wholesale facility.
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