Datacentre giant OVH skeptical on Alibaba's European expansion

CEO Paulin says OVH wants to provide a pan-European alternative to the public cloud leaders

French infrastructure giant OVH has laid out plans to become the "true alternative European cloud provider" as global public cloud giants continue their expansions.

Three months since he took over as CEO from OVH's founder Octave Klaba, Michel Paulin (pictured) told CRN sister publication Channelnomics Europe that his firm wants to offer the European channel and end users a home-grown option even as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and now Alibaba continue to make gains in European markets.

"Cloud should imply trust. Legally, with the Patriot Act, customers outside the US ask, ‘what are the consequences for my data?' We are not affected by those regulations.

"We protect data with European laws, which offer a lot of protections for personal and corporate data. And we are pure open source and open stack, which means we are completely transparent in the way we deliver our solutions. If someone wants to inspect our code, they can."

When pressed for his reaction to Alibaba's expansion in several of OVH's core markets in recent months, in the CEE and UK, Paulin said: "Alibaba is very interesting. I don't know which laws they say they are complying with. What I can say is that we are a trusted provider because we have strict data protection standards. This is how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors."

Paulin's claim that European firms retain a lingering wariness of the international public giants has been supported by some channel players.

The CEO of top French VAR Cheops Nicolas Leroy-Fleuriot recently said that he will "never, never work with Alibaba", citing the "risks of being spied on or of having data violations."

Although clearly not all European businesses share these concerns.

The top four global public cloud giants are only increasing their European operations.

OVH is also expanding across the continent, with new datacentres in Spain and Italy, in addition to other countries set to be revealed in the next couple of months.

"Today, we are in the process of investing €300m (£265.3m) every year until 2020, and we are going to triple that after 2020," Paulin said.

The firm's datacentre footprint comprises 27 facilities in 11 countries across four continents worldwide.