OVHcloud CEO says UK and European providers should get a bigger slice of global cloud spend

The company boss got candid with CRN about his views on UK and European cloud providers vs US cloud giants

The CEO of Europe's leading cloud player OVHcloud says UK and European cloud providers should be more ambitious in taking more market spend away from US hyperscaler giants.

Michel Paulin sat down with CRN and gave his views on how the European cloud market is developing after his group closed 2022 on a high.

The European cloud market earned €10.4bn in Q2 2022, growing more than five times its size from early 2017.

European service providers grew their cloud revenues by 167 per cent over that same period, according to data from Synergy Research Group, however, none have come close to challenging the big US cloud providers for leadership of the European market which is being dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Paulin described this struggle for market share as an "endless debate" on why local European players cannot win against US hyperscalers.

He said the answer lies partially in the vision of some European players who want to "impose" their solutions on customers.

However, he believes what is more important to the market and what is most crucial for the customer is the freedom of choice.

"Not giving freedom of choice is not good for the market and of course not good for the customers in the end," he said.

"And why? Are we more stupid than the hyperscaler's engineers? I don't think so. I'm sure that in the UK, in France, Germany, we have excellent engineers able to propose alternative solutions.

"There are many start-ups, and in the UK you have a lot of very active start-ups. It's a shame that in the end, they're all bought by hyperscalers because they have more money than the local players."

Click through to hear the CEO's thoughts on how to take on the US hyperscaler giants and recent price rises...

OVHcloud CEO says UK and European providers should get a bigger slice of global cloud spend

The company boss got candid with CRN about his views on UK and European cloud providers vs US cloud giants

OVHcloud's priorities in 2023

The French cloud computing firm started the year strong by gaining six new Database-as-a-Service solutions through a partnership with Finnish software company Aiven.

The Paris-based group declared it was going to market with a new suite of enterprise file storage services with US vendor NetApp shortly after.

OVHcloud's growth was not restrained to only channel partnerships, boasting the acquisition of Paris and San Francisco-HQ ForePaaS and expanding its footprint with a new €30m datacentre in France.

"Our second priority this year is to continue to expand internationally. Today we have operations and datacentres in four continents," OVHcloud CEO Michel Paulin told CRN.

"We will extend also with the new datacentre in Toronto, Canada, new datacentres in the US, and we will launch 15 new datacentres in next two years to be able to continue to grow and to accelerate our growth into these regions."

OVHcloud managed to escape being curbed by last year's economic turmoil that has seeped its way into 2023, exceeding sales targets in its FY22 results with revenues of €788m, up 18.8 per cent.

The company attributed its progress to the "overall cloud market dynamism", in particular the significant growth opportunity in public cloud and private cloud.

Lifting the lid further on OVHcloud's business strategy for 2023, Paulin in fact said the group's plan has not altered since its origin following the successful €460m IPO in October 2021, and reaffirmed his trust in the cloud, which the company clearly continues to reap the rewards of.

"We believe the need for cloud solutions will remain and will remain very strong. OVHcloud has most, if not all the attributes to be able to address what the public sector and bigger corporations, tech companies and SMEs need to be able to do so," he told CRN.

"We will continue to apply what were our key priorities for the next four or five years. The main one is to continue to innovate and to continue to propose new solutions with a specific focus on platform as a service."

OVHcloud CEO says UK and European providers should get a bigger slice of global cloud spend

The company boss got candid with CRN about his views on UK and European cloud providers vs US cloud giants

OVHcloud on price rises

Another detail which may have helped the group maintain revenue growth last year was its move to increase prices for existing services by ten per cent.

The rises were in line with industry wide increases and aimed to mitigate inflation on overall cost.

On how the global economy may impact OVHcloud in 2023, Paulin unfortunately doesn't possess a crystal ball to predict its effect on his company.

"It's very difficult to make a prediction of what's going to happen in 2023. We decided to increase our pricing because we want to maintain the right level of productivity to continue to invest, recruit and to innovate," he said.

"I still do believe that inflation will stay in 2023 and potentially we might have some adjustments."