Blog – April 2016

Cloud and all that!

I recently attended a couple of cloud events. The first was run by 451 Research and was an interesting day – part research results and part informed conjecture. One of the conclusions unsurprisingly was that Cloud is now mainstream. Look back even to 2012 and this was not the case. In 2 years’ time the adoption will be even higher and data centres remain at the heart of things.

A chance conversation with John Wilson from Lombard led to me being part of an Investment and Valuation discussion panel at Data Centre World in Excel last week. This was combined with Cloud Expo Europe/Cloud Security Expo and Smart IOT – so there was plenty for everyone!

The focus of the valuation discussion was around non-technical issues – markets, customers and management. There certainly appears to be an increasing trend toward specialisation, which might be expected given the presence of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in the public cloud space, and this has been reflected in recent acquisition activity. For example Claranet’s acquisition of Techgate Plc. 

The lesson for owner managers everywhere is that focus has been and remains a key strategic imperative.