SMB, WordPress, Europe, managed third party cloud
It was a busy week with developments coming from all corners of the sector.
One of the more interesting developments was the AWS Lightsail partnership with GoDaddy that is targeted at WordPress users. The partnership shows how important the application layer has become, but also provides clues as to how providers are going to prioritize the resources they put into infrastructure. We have some details and some previous coverage is useful for review.
There were a number of developments of interest in Europe. On the data centre side, Digital Realty acquired land and looks to be making a re-entry into the Paris market, while Rackspace won a European customer in managed third party cloud. Cloud and hosting providers in the US continue to expand their footprints globally and Hivelocity was the latest to make this jump and brought online its first European node in Frankfurt. Also in Europe, we saw Germany’s dogado complete another acquisition.
Managed third party cloud is becoming more and more mainstream and products and services are unsurprisingly becoming more formalized. Two providers – 2nd Watch and Ensono – recently refined their programs. Meanwhile, DXC and Microsoft pushed the envelope on their partnership around managed Azure.
A market that continues to transition inevitably leads to widespread product development. Equinix recently rolled out Network Edge services as it looks to use NFV to help end users with pushing network presence to the edge, while VMware built security capabilities and Virtuozzo released the latest version of its converged infrastructure platform.
Finally, there was more half-year reporting out of the UK and Europe. We looked at the results coming from United Internet and IDE.
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