M&A, results, managed third party cloud, outages, SMB
It was a busy week as the sector picked up speed after the Memorial Day long weekend lull.
Picking up where we left off last week, there was more strategic activity as Claranet confirmed completion of three acquisitions in the UK, France and Portugal. On Friday, it was announced that Digital Realty would acquire fellow wholesale provider DuPont Fabros for $7.6b. The deal adds significant wholesale inventory in North America to Digital’s portfolio along with some strategic customers. Details to come.
As earnings season winds down, we continue to delve into the results. In the past week, we looked at SMB providers GoDaddy and Wix and dig into Zayo’s infrastructure services business. Over in the UK, privately held UKFast provided transparency into its results and Exponential-e reported growth from its cloud business line.
There was more activity in managed third party cloud. Ensono, based in Chicago, recently disclosed a managed cloud customer and brought on a VP from Logicworks to help lead this service arm. Meanwhile, the global cloud build out along with the expansion of direct interconnection services continues at a steady pace. The wholesale data centres supporting this infrastructure is still being built mostly in the major markets though some places like Oregon and Montreal are getting in on the action with abundant low cost power. Could Florida be the next wholesale data hotspot? It has relatively low energy prices and was the latest to pass new tax incentives to try and lure wholesale data centres. Can it be successful? To a certain extent it might, but at the end of the day it probably won’t for the most part. We have more details.
Outages were a prominent theme last week and we learned this past week that the big British Airways outage was due primarily to human error.
There was also was more activity in the SMB space. Squarespace added more analytics capabilities and Open-Xchange updated its App Suite with new features. Meanwhile, Digital Ocean has served the SMB space for a long time and is now adding to its ability to grow with these customers and attract new ones with higher capacity requirements.
or