Michel Paulin (OVHcloud)
French cloud computing provider OVHcloud has revealed plans to significantly ramp up its presence outside of Europe, with a particular eye on the United States and Asia Pacific.
This follows its recent listing on the Euronext Paris stock exchange, attracting €350 million capital injection along with a €1.8 billion support plan by the French government to boost French companies on a global scale in the cloud computing market.
In his address during its Ecosystem Experience 2021, OVHcloud CEO Michel Paulin said the new OVHcloud will grow faster due to the new financial resources that will be used to accelerate its innovation roadmap and globally expand. OVHcloud counts 1.6 million customers across 140 countries. It is currently planning to build a data centre in India and add a second data centre in Canada.
“The initial public offering (IPO) is kicking off a new five-year strategy plan and it is a new stepping stone and chapter in the company’s history,” Paulin said. “It’s a way to keep on innovating and speed up our growth beyond Europe. A stronger global presence means more data centres in Europe, South Asia and North America to be as close as possible to your markets wherever you are, whenever you need us."
“We grew on our own for 20 years, by 20 per cent year-on-year growth and today we take off on a new growth journey," he added.
Paulin said trusted cloud, global expansion and sustainability will remain key priorities. Through its carbon capture program OVHcloud itself has committed to net zero direct emissions by 2025 through its own operations and manufacturing, and by 2030 to reach net zero emissions through its entire value chain including contractors and suppliers.
OVHcloud chairman and founder Octave Klaba revealed it five-year strategy surrounding new products, data centres, commercial offices and new customer segments such as wholesalers.
The company's APAC general manager Lionel Legros said it was aiming to strengthen its position in the Singapore market as well as Australia, and was on a hiring spree for new talent across the region.
“It’s important for us to have a multi-local strategy, which for us means dealing with local regulation, currency, data sovereignty and providing local support,” he said. “We have a project to expand into four additional countries, especially in Southeast Asia because it’s one of the fastest growing markets. The main driver for us is not just about the puncture of growth within this region, but because of the opportunities there.
“We’re also considering data sovereignty in every country and that’s a bit tricky in Southeast Asia, because it’s not a federated region so every country is improving or building their own data regulation. We want to make sure that part of our go-to-market will not be under any extraterritorial regulation and we can still keep this very strong position for us, which is data sovereignty.”
OVHcloud operates across two main segments -- digital native and small-to-medium-sized business, and corporate and enterprise.
According to Legros, Asia Pacific will form an explicitly indirect channel approach, with technology partnerships already in place with VMware, Google, NetApp, SAP and Nutanix.
“In the last 12 to 18 months we have built a channel of partners around the region,” he said.
Legros further explained part of its wholesale strategy involves making all of its public cloud stack, based on OpenStack integration, open to managed service providers to deploy directly on a customer’s site.
“They should be able to build a hybrid scenario directly on-site managed by OVH or managed by the MSP, including the resources in our data centres," he said.
In February, OVHcloud doubled its server capacity in Australia after striking a new partnership with data centre operator NextDC, and doubled its Singapore data centre capability.
