AWS, cloud, commodity servers, APAC, data centres, M&A
It was another busy week across the sector. There were a number of notable strategic developments, AWS reported its 3Q17 results and there were more developments around managed third party cloud.
Amazon typically reports early during earnings season and like clockwork, turned in another strong quarter on the AWS side of the house. AWS also released some interesting data points about its ‘traditional’ hosting service Lightsail and the progress it is making with cloud migrations. The data points speak to how keen Amazon is to pursue a wide range of user demographics and provides evidence that the addressable market out there still remains healthy. Another enterprise user – Symantec – is moving to cloud and also released some interesting data points that underscore where things are going and how fast they are starting to move.
The cloud continues to impact key pieces up and down the value chain. As public cloud grows, the data centre sector has seen a significant shift to wholesale, while interconnection is increasingly strategic. Also being disrupted? Hardware vendors. The likes of HPE have been pushed up the value chain as the big clouds go straight to hardware manufacturers in Asia. The impact has been clear and HPE decided it would exit the commodity server market and focus more on converged stacks.
In the strategic arena, there were a wide range of developments. On the data centre side, Digital Realty was involved in a number of transactions as it looks to double down in primary markets and phase out of secondary ones. And in Asia, Digital revealed details about a new JV with Mitsubishi. Elsewhere in Asia, media reports indicate the Metronode process appears to be in full swing. Asia-based investment vehicles have moved into Europe and now have the US on its radar. Singapore-based Mapletree acquired a portfolio of data centres from Carter Validus in a deal worth $750m.
Smallers providers were also involved in M&A. Calligo acquired a Canadian provider and Servers Australia continues to consolidate down under. Meanwhile, the MSP side continues to see activity. Thrive Networks closed another deal, Evolve IP acquired some technology and Capitas Partners acquired a small MSP in Los Angeles.
The managed third party cloud segment has been a bit quiet lately, but this past week Hostway shared some data points about its progress with Azure and we saw more integrators adopt the managed third party cloud model for SAP.
Finally, containers continue to gain momentum. Virtuozzo released a storage product geared to capturing this opportunity and Docker management made some interesting comments about why containers are important. The future is hybrid and movement between deployment models will be increasingly crucial. Containers is one way to get there.
or