7 Acquisitions that Point to Cloud Maturity
While strides are indeed being made in the world of cloud computing, the most recent mergers and acquisitions show a marketplace that is beginning to mature.
Over the better part of a decade, cloud computing mergers and acquisitions painted a picture where cloud service providers were on the hunt to accumulate as many customers as possible. Thus, you saw massive build-outs of facilities and a haphazard set of mergers and acquisitions that had no real rhyme or reason. We also witnessed incredible price wars when it came to commodity cloud resources in the IaaS and PaaS space. In a nutshell, the cloud service provider market has always about growth by any means necessary.
If you contrast previous years' cloud acquisitions with those that have occurred the latter parts of 2017 and into 2018, we start to see a new pattern forming.
Sure, there are still signs of significant growth in the cloud space for those looking for bleeding-edge services. Yet at the same time, you see a trend towards stability and cloud acquisition dollars trending toward following what the customer wants in a cloud service -- as opposed to the other way around.
If you look at seven of the more interesting IT acquisitions that have happened over the past six months, they each fit into one of three general cloud categories:
Cloud management and interoperability: In this category, the acquisition is of value because the purchased technology helps customers to better manage their cloud resources, or allows them to integrate different cloud resources to add value in some capacity. Here, we can see that the acquisitions aren't necessarily about acquiring new customers. Instead, the focus is on providing better service in terms of management capabilities that they hope will allow the customer to expand the overall amount of services they purchase.
Migrate apps to the cloud or build cloud-native apps: While a large percentage of enterprises across the globe have already migrated apps and data to the cloud, there are still plenty of opportunities left in private data centers. These are the apps and data that are likely to be the most difficult to migrate. So, from a "move to the cloud" perspective, cloud providers are acquiring technologies to either assist with migration -- or they are investing in tools to build new ones from the ground up.
Cloud security: Despite all the interest and movement toward cloud computing, security remains the top concern for enterprise It managers. Service providers continue to invest heavily in acquiring security tools that help to not only squash any concerns that customers may have -- but also as a way to further growth through new revenue streams using the security tools gained. We've already seen several high-profile mergers/acquisitions in late 2017 and early 2018 that are security-focused. Expect plenty more in the future.
Now that we've framed what we feel is a trending toward a maturing of the cloud computing market in 2018, please view the slideshow as we point out acquisitions that have led us to that conclusion.
While strides are indeed being made in the world of cloud computing, the most recent acquisitions show a marketplace that is beginning to mature. As enterprises begin to trust the cloud with all their compute, storage, and networking needs, their wants and needs change. Thus, we see, and will continue to see, acquisitions that focus on the creation, management and security of enterprise cloud resources.
While strides are indeed being made in the world of cloud computing, the most recent acquisitions show a marketplace that is beginning to mature. As enterprises begin to trust the cloud with all their compute, storage, and networking needs, their wants and needs change. Thus, we see, and will continue to see, acquisitions that focus on the creation, management and security of enterprise cloud resources.
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