Public cloud adoption, cloud ecosystem, MSP, M&A, hyperscale, earnings, cloud repatriation, APAC
It was a busy week across the sector as earnings season was in full swing, while a number of interesting data points and perspectives emerged around public cloud and its surrounding ecosystem. Meanwhile, there was some M&A activity, while data centre expansion continued in global markets and self-builds continue to emerge.
Last week, we took a closer look at the public cloud results coming from Microsoft and Google. This week, we delve into AWS’s results, which has seen some more slowing, and we examined Meta’s plans for data centre expansion despite a similarly slowing trajectory.
The public clouds have slowed in the past several quarters and a lot of this is being driven by slowing economic conditions and not wholesale shifts away from the public cloud model. But there are those that have decided to move off public cloud. The parent company of SaaS provider Basecamp got some attention after it stated its intentions to move about $3m in annual public cloud back into proprietary infrastructure and colocation.
The ecosystem around cloud saw activity as well. Rackspace’s Analyst Day had some insights around its new organizational structure and strategy, with more detailed numbers set to come out this week. Meanwhile, we have some data points around demand for managed public cloud services and value-add service uptake.
The M&A arena has been quiet of late, but there some transactions of note. Stonepeak increased its investment in American Tower’s data centre business, while there were a few deals on the MSP and managed infrastructure side. 11:11 Systems recently acquired Sungard’s recovery business to go with the cloud and managed infrastructure assets, and Oracle Shop Inoapps picked up Tier1.
There was more data centre expansion activity around the world. Vantage Data Centers began construction on a second phase in Phoenix, DRFortress expanded in Honolulu, AdaniConnex brought online a data centre in Chennai and Teraco opened its latest data centre in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Finally, there was self-build activity coming out of APAC. Google is close to bringing online a new data centre in Tokyo and AWS declared plans to build a new cloud region in Thailand.
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