Businesses providing migration, integration and other IT services for the three most popular IaaS players – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – are being bought at a record pace. Enterprises are migrating IT workloads off-premises at an increasing pace, and cloud migration and integration service providers must keep up. In addition to expanding internally, some cloud vendors are leaning on inorganic growth to add expertise and fill customer needs.
According to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, purchases of service providers around those three IaaS players are being inked at a record pace, with nine already this year. That equals the volume for all of 2017 and surpasses the full annual total for any year before that. Notable deals this year include Cloudreach’s acquisition of Relus Cloud last week and Hitachi’s pickup of AWS integrator REAN Cloud, which itself bought AWS integrator 47Lining last year. For Cloudreach, acquiring Relus Cloud added expertise from a company that got its start in 2013 as a consulting services firm focused solely on AWS adoption and migration. Relus Cloud subsequently garnered a reputation as an expert in cloud data analysis products such as Amazon’s Hadoop-based Elastic MapReduce and Redshift data warehouse.
Considering the rate at which companies are migrating off-premises, we expect these types of transactions to continue. Businesses’ primary IT environments are on the move. According to a Voice of the Enterprise survey, the share of organizations employing off-premises IT infrastructure as their primary environment is set to jump to 66% by 2020 from 48% this year. And that shift is most pronounced among the largest companies. Among enterprises with at least 10,000 employees, just 11% use IaaS or PaaS as their primary environment, although 28% expect to move their environment to the cloud in two years.
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