“I can see that confidence reigns: the 19 pages you have just signed, you haven’t even reread.” Economy minister (DP) only stayed for five minutes at the formal ceremony enshrining the union of Deep by Post and OVH Cloud, but his punchline hits the nail on the head.
Like the wedding vows that two newlyweds would exchange, Post CEO and OVH CEO Benjamin Revcolevschi take the time to highlight different elements of their partnership.
Strasser notes “that they had found each other,” “that they were made for each other,” that “Deep is a trusted player in the digital sector and OVH one of the few European champions,” and that they share “a common DNA and form the ideal partners for a sovereign cloud solution.”
For Revcolevschi, the “technology is also about men and women and trust,” he feels that in a year of discussions “something very strong has emerged that will go a long way,” these are “two tech companies that love tech” and that they are “motivated to make this partnership succeed.”
Sovereignty, a triple challenge
The two companies are officially embracing a shared destiny , announced in November 2024 and based on OVH Cloud’s open source technology and services. This will allow companies or the state to have the guarantee that their data will not leave Luxembourg (or Europe) and that the technologies to operate them will always be available.
The election of the new American president has accelerated awareness of the need to keep control of one’s data. The more sensitive it is--such as data related to health or finances--the more important it will be to be able to protect it.
“We need to avoid a shutdown,” argues Deep by Post director Sébastien Genesca. Depending on political considerations, “a service that could be opened or cut.”
“There’s [the possibility of] a shutdown,” replies Luxembourg’s Mr Cybersecurity, François Thill, also present at the roundtable, “or multiplying the price of the service by ten. These are things we’ve already seen and in a country like ours, it’s important.”
Sovereignty actually has three components: data sovereignty, operational sovereignty and technological sovereignty, leading the OVH Cloud CEO to talk about the need to develop European sovereign cloud capabilities. “There are European alternatives, credible European players. In this field, where there are 15 building blocks, sometimes the leader is not European, but there are always four or five credible European players,” he assures us, inviting company directors in Luxembourg and Europe to demand that their teams opt for these technologies, even when it is not “natural” to do so. “Five years ago, our annual turnover was €500m. Today, that figure is close to €1bn. We didn’t do sovereign cloud. Today, it represents 20% of our earnings.”
Where do they see themselves in five years? “Today, hyperscalers have 72-75% of the cloud market share in Europe. I hope that despite the rapid adoption of the cloud and the development of artificial intelligence, we will manage to preserve the 20 to 25% market share that goes to European solutions,” says Revcolevschi. He’s led an impressive French delegation--including more than half of his comex--to witness the official launch of this partnership in the grand duchy.
Preserving his shares doesn’t sound like a “crazy crazy” life project, but “five years, at the current rate, is a long way off,” says Genesca.
Not to mention that, as in all good love stories, vaudeville theatre or not, another trio has already consummated its union: Clarence, born of Luxconnect, Proximus and Google. It has already announced its first two clients, the (CSSF) and the .
Google must have had its ears ringing as the little insider jabs and magic phrases came thick and fast on Monday afternoon. Like Genesca’s “we too could have signed up to American technology that we could have disguised.”
Or, “the big problem with Clarence is that customers have to build their applications themselves. Here, with OVH, you can probably create solutions that are sold by another Luxembourg company, which is Deep. It’s much more difficult with Clarence. Because there, there’s a separation by physical server because of banking sector regulations: two banks can’t share the same server. This has a big impact on the price. Europe has a programme called Digital Decade 2030, where each country has a target of getting 80% of SMEs into the cloud. In this case, with well-known European technologies--I’m a customer--that aren’t too expensive, it’s interesting for SMEs,” says Thill.
That’s not necessarily wrong, but coming from a high-ranking public servant who has just signed an initial contract with Clarence, it’s clumsy to say the least. Which Mr Cybersecurity makes up for a few moments later with a big smile to say that he only wanted to explain the differences properly.
This article was originally published in .