Data centre expansions, Asia-pacific, Singapore, MSP lines blurring
It was a steady week across the sector with data centre expansion being the dominant theme.
The activity was global in scope. In the US, T5 and Vantage are setting out to build large wholesale campuses in Texas and NoVA and QTS is also said to have purchased land in NoVA. Elsewhere in the US, Involta opened a Pittsburgh data centre and Internap expanded with Digital Realty Trust in Phoenix. In Europe, Equinix closed its acquisition of Itonic and Zenium secured resources for its expansion in Germany.
There was also more activity in Asia. NEXTDC opened its second Brisbane data centre, there is a build in Myanmar and Salesforce expanded in Australia as well, though it has done this on the back of the AWS cloud (WP Engine did the same in recent weeks). There were also strategic developments in the region. The Canadian Pension Fund partnered with Singapore’s Keppel Group to invest further in the data centre space and there has been a lot of chatter in Singapore around the statements attributed to wealthy tycoon Oei Hong Leong, who is interested in putting significant capital into the sector. The news prompted Channel News Asia to reach out to Structure Research for a story about the data centre market, which can be viewed here.
Showing that the market is increasingly global, CyrusOne also has an eye on Asia and it invested $100m in China-focused data centre operator GDS as it looks to attract some of the demand for infrastructure coming from large Chinese Internet properties and clouds.
There were some big colocation wins as well, notably the Edgeconnex deal with Cloudflare, which spans nearly 20 locations across Edgeconnex’s US footprint. Existing customers continue to drive expansion and this was the case with the Internap expansion in Phoenix, which was in support of a growing customer.
Earnings season is not upon us, but Interoute in the UK reported its 1H17 results. Meanwhile, on the private side, Digital Ocean revealed some very interesting data points about its growth trajectory. It continues to prove there is a use case separate from the large public cloud platforms.
The lines between service providers continues to blur and strategic activity reflected it. Thrive Networks, backed by M/C Partners, acquired another MSP as it continues to build out a new platform with both infrastructure hosting and MSP-managed services capabilities.
There was also activity on the WordPress side as WP Engine expanded its presence in Australia and GoDaddy extended its managed WordPress capabilities to Canada.
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