OVHcloud boss fingers UK as key geography for growth
CEO Michel Paulin opens up on creating a European alternative to American and Chinese cloud providers
OVHcloud has identified the UK as a region where it wants to grab more market share from its rivals, according to CEO Michel Paulin.
Speaking with CRN's sister publication Channel Partner Insight, Paulin conceded that OVHcloud is "still under the radar".
As the CEO of Europe's only cloud giant, with 19 datacentres in EMEA, he wants 2020 to be the year when Europe's channel sees a viable alternative to the "long-standing hegemony of the American and Chinese hyperscalers."
"We are in the top ten of global cloud providers, and it is unfortunate that we are the only European one," Paulin told CPI.
"It is our ambition to create an ecosystem of data, hosting and cloud infrastructure, which will provide a true alternative.
"Multi-hybrid cloud will be the future, and the choice for customers and partners is where they want their critical business data to be held."
To mark OVHcloud's 20th year, the France-headquartered firm has recently undergone a rebrand to add "cloud" to its name.
Paulin said this is because he wants European firms to have no ambiguity as to what the company's sole focus is.
"We are positioning ourselves as a European player able to provide the full suite of cloud solutions, and will allow the customer to have an agility that they may not find from some of the players that have a bit too much hegemony," he said.
Where that message has already had a lot of traction includes France, Italy, Holland, Quebec, Canada and Spain.
However, Paulin the UK and Singapore as countries where he is aggressively targeting capturing market share.
Key to this is a strategy of appealing to what he calls "momentum in Europe towards openness, reversibility, transparency, and open source solutions."
What's helped recently, according to Paulin, is the US Cloud Act.
Passed last year, it gives US authorities greater access to data under law-enforcement guidelines and has allegedly caused consternation among some European customers.
"It's a real question mark. The protection of personal or enterprise data is really a topic where we see a lot of traction.
"You should have the choice, and we have the capacity today to choose exactly where your data is stored, whether you want Frankfurt or Amsterdam…
"And that's why we are confident that our positioning of openness, of reversibility, of transparency, GDPR compliance, and open source solutions will help us."
However, last month OVHcloud had another US heavyweight intrude into its home market when datacentre and colocation firm Interxion sold up to American giant Digital Realty in a mammoth $8.4bn deal.
Paulin claimed that the deal will not directly impact his strategy, because he has no plans to get into the managed services space.
"We are an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) provider and we intend to continue to be very prevalent in the IaaS space, and not to try to compete against some of our own customers, which are managed services provider. We have many of those kinds of customers," Paulin said.
"As part of our rebrand we are conscious that we have work to be done to create much more brand awareness.
And so we are staying focused on a key core message, that we are the European alternative to the American and Chinese hyperscalers."