Dear customers, partners and friends,

On behalf of our 2,900 OVHcloud employees, I am delighted to wish you all the best for this new year 2024. January is the best month for making new, ambitious resolutions. So, we hope that the innovations presented during the 10th edition of the OVHcloud Summit will help you to achieve your digital and cloud goals. But also, strengthen your trust in the European tech ecosystem. We have the talent, resources and capabilities to innovate together. To serve organisations and support their digital transformation: Innovation for freedom.

Shaping tomorrow’s cloud today

First of all, we would like to say thank you. We are humbled by the opportunity to demonstrate an unwavering commitment. Above all, to provide you with top-notch solutions on a daily basis.

In 2024, you, our partners, start-ups and customers, will be at the pivotal point of a new technological paradigm. Shaping tomorrow’s cloud today. Our goal is to make digital tools accessible to all our customers, and build and strengthen trust in the cloud.

Our commitments in 2024

These fundamental principles will define the pace at which we’ll fulfill our commitments in 2024:

1. Strengthening trust in the cloud: We are always working to develop trusted solutions. Our goal is to ensure your data is safe and secure. Plus, to protect the intellectual property rights of your solutions and products. This is very important today, with the use of AI growing by leaps and bounds. This year, we will focus on shortening the time to market of our SecNumCloud solutions in France. In light of this, we have opened our third datacentre in Gravelines. We have begun the process to get our 40 PaaS services certified by SNC.
2. Addressing innovation challenges: Our teams have designed over 40 Public Cloud solutions to offer you unbeatable price-performance ratios. In the coming years, we plan to push the envelope, thanks to our ecosystem and make new compute instances, MongoDB database, Rancher solutions for hybrid cloud available. Additionally, we will be launching a brand new comprehensive data management offering, OVHcloud Data Platform – beta version available. Lastly, in line with future commitments, we are developing products and solutions. Ready to prepare for the quantum revolution, which could lead to technological disruption.
3. Making Artificial Intelligence free, open and accessible: Thanks to a brand new AI App Builder service, a new comprehensive range of infrastructure solutions (GPU instances) and AI suite software are now available. This new service unlocks the potential of AI, enabling our customers to build generative AI applications and customise chatbots. With this serverless and low-code tool, you can enter all your private data into a trusted, sustainable-by-design cloud environment, while selecting a desired LLM in just a few clicks.
4. Expanding our global reach: By using new deployment models, we can now offer our customers edge cloud services through local zones, expected to reach 150 by 2026. We are opening two new local zones to serve Brussels and Madrid. Before summer 2024, 16 local zones will be deployed.

As we embark on this new chapter together, we would like to thank everyone. We wish you a prosperous year ahead! We look forward to working with you to accelerate your business projects.

Michel Paulin and the entire OVHcloud Team

On behalf of the entire OVHcloud team, I am delighted to wish you all the best for this new year.
2023 opens with unprecedent changes in the world. Whatever challenges you’ll face, we are very proud to support you in your digital projects, and we are grateful for the trust that you have placed in us year after year.

This trust is at the heart of our model: it guides the relationships we forge with our ecosystem, and directs all of our technical innovation strategy. It also gives us a greater sense of responsibility in how we deploy our open, sustainable and transparent business model.

Our teams are keen to support you, and remain committed to understanding and addressing your current and future business challenges. Together with all of you — our valued customers and partners — we will continue to build a trusted cloud. To do this, we are constantly expanding our portfolio by offering new products, namely a comprehensive set of PaaS solutions (managed databases, containerisation services,  AI, Modern Apps). More than 40 new solutions have been designed by our teams and with market leaders to offer you the best price/performance ratio on more than 80 products. We have moved swiftly to the forefront of planning ahead for the quantum revolution that will shake up technology as we know it.

We are building with you a next-generation multi-cloud ecosystem, driven by our common values. Values that you, as customers or partners, already demonstrate and defend with your users: reversibility, interoperability, sustainability, and predictable pricing. Like you, we believe that success is — above all — the result of a collective approach and commitments.

Thanks to your continued trust in us, and your commitment to our ethical and sustainable cloud, we can continue jointly developing solutions.

What we have shaped together has brought us far: we are now in the world’s top rankings, and IDC recently named us a “Major Player” in its latest study “OVHcloud is positioned in the ‘Major Players’ category in the IDC MarketScape study: Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2022 Vendor Assessment”. (Source: IDC 2022)

In 2023, we will continue to offer the best price-performance ratio on the market. We will continue these developments by building on our 4 pillars:

• Innovation to offer you the best products, especially with nearly 60 PaaS solutions now available.
• An active ecosystem of integrator partners, publishers and startups, covering all sectors and uses.
• A trusted, sovereign cloud (with compliance for all local regulations).
• An eco-responsible, sustainable cloud.

Innovation: A driver of our common growth

The high-performance cloud technology that powers our solutions is designed to be a solid driver of growth for our ecosystem of customers and partners (more than 1,100 active partners). To increase your value proposition, our products will also include new key features soon, such as:

• Enhanced security (IAM and KMS).
• Storage (Object and Block Storage) to manage the higher volumes of data required for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.
• Containerisation (Kubernetes).

Finally, for those of you who use our services to handle the most sensitive data, we have developed strategic solutions like Datacentre as-a-Service— and we have already mobilised a community to support future quantum offerings.

An ecosystem to drive your success

In 2023, we will continue to federate the entire ecosystem internationally. Some of you are already trailblazers in supporting and accelerating the transformation of cloud infrastructure suchas Sopra Steria, Accenture, Bechtle, Capgemini and Inetum.

Together, with some of our most strategic partners, we will pursue a strengthened commitment to a trusted and sovereign cloud through the Open Trusted Cloud label.

You can find our range of programs, ecosystem members (900 R&D developers), and strategic technology alliances such as Samsung, AMD, VMware, Nutanix, Veeam, Intel, MongoDB, Aiven, Platform.sh and NetApp.

We support the most innovative startups (2,900 in the OVHcloud Startup Program) which now extends to the United States. And with our Marketplace, we’re expanding the catalogue of SaaS and PaaS solutions based on our trusted cloud

Our Open Trusted Cloud label is supported by our 600 software publishers. It guarantees compliance with all of our actions, along with the strictest regulations — on both a European and international level. To meet the challenges of our customers and partners, we are compliant with European certifications such as G-Cloud in the UK, SecNumCloud and HDS in France, C5 in Germany, and AgID in Italy.

These valuable collaborations contribute to the success of your digital transformation. The success of our Ecosystem Experience 2022 collective event is a testament to the importance of this joint work. Once again, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who took part in this event — whether you were involved as speakers during the keynote, official partners, or whether you watched our international broadcast and replay.

Thank you for helping us make this event a success!

In the spirit of continuing to unite our community, we’re inviting tech enthusiasts to our Very Tech Trip convention, which will be held on 2 February at the Cité des Sciences in Paris. Whether you are a developer, systems administrator, data scientist, solutions architect, student, OVHcloud Startup Program member, Open Trusted Cloud member or partner, you areinvited to a full day of keynotes and workshops on themes such as infrastructure and hardware, data management, innovation, security and the web.

Becoming a key player in sustainable development and the circular economy by offering the best price-performance ratio on the market

Since our creation, we have continuously improved our unique industrial model to meet your needs as closely as possible. Our model is vertically integrated, and ranges from manufacturing our servers in our own factories to refurbishing hardware components. This is what helps us extend service life, and repair components on a large scale. This refurbishing cycle is completely unique on the market, and our integrated model guarantees our independence and sovereignty. This is why we can guarantee competitive prices on the market — even in this current climate of geo-political upheaval and global economic turbulence.

Since 2002, we have also guaranteed your control over your energy costs and budget. We are one of the cloud’s leading champion terms of energy reduction, with a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) score of 30-50% less than the market standard, and a WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness) score 5-10x lower than the market standard. All of this is supported by innovative water-cooling technology, which was one of the first of its kind to be applied on an industrial scale.

We also reduce our carbon emissions through our very low energy and water usage, thanks to our integrated industrial model (we build our servers), the requalification of our datacentre components, and our ability to recycle and refurbish components in a circular economy in France.

We are committed to remaining transparent about our sustainability commitments.

In a fast-changing world, our teams have also worked hard to develop cloud solutions that are sized to meet your specific needs — especially if you contribute to certain industries, such as financial services, media, defence, the public sector, and the healthcare sector.

In 2023 and beyond, we will continue to reaffirm our vision and the common values we share with you. We remain committed to doing everything we can to ensure you have an open, reversible, transparent and sustainable cloud — one where you can innovate in total freedom. We are deeply touched by your renewed trust in us, and we promise to continue offering affordable solutions that are tailored to your needs and expectations. Your recognition drives us on a daily basis, and encourages us to innovate continuously, so that you can bring all of your cloud projects to life. With no technical or financial lock-in, our trusted cloud will help you continue to grow in total security.

We look forward to writing these new pages together and supporting you in your freedom to innovate.

We wish you a successful new year!

Michel Paulin and the entire OVHcloud Team

The best price/performance ratio

For more than 20 years now, OVHcloud has been supporting you in your digital life by upholding a SMART cloud.
A cloud that liberates its users with Simple, Multi-local, Accessible, Reversible and Transparent solutions. This belief is reflected on a daily basis with offers featuring the best price/performance ratios on the market, and we will not renege on this fundamental promise.

General inflation

In 2021 and especially in 2022, the global rates of inflation have changed our daily lives. With an annual rate reaching +8.9% in July 2022 in Europe, including a 39.7% increase in energy costs, inflation has a significant impact on all business sectors, including the digital sector.

Thanks to the long-term management of our energy costs in 2021, we did not immediately need to change our prices. However, at the end of 2022 and in 2023, part of our energy purchases coverage are coming to an end and we are going to end up buying energy at a higher price, the current fast-growing market price across the world. This is a significant increase that we unfortunately have to pass on to all of our services directly linked to the electricity consumption of our infrastructures. This price increase will affect both new and existing services.

Regarding existing services, we will proceed with a managed price increase of approximately 10%. It will be effective on 01 November 2022 on Public Cloud and on 01 December 2022 on Bare Metal technology (Dedicated Servers, Eco range, VPS), Hosted Private Cloud and Web Hosting plans. Over the next few weeks, we will keep you informed regarding the price change service-by-service.

An unchanged commitment

Price/performance is part of our core commitments and remains at the heart of our value proposition to our customers. Currently, you already benefit from the savings we help you make thanks to innovations like water cooling and reversibility. These new inflation pressures do not change our objectives: to better serve you and offer you total freedom in the advanced use of our infrastructures and services by bringing you even more innovations.

Octave Klaba and Michel Paulin

Le meilleur ratio prix-performance

Cela fait déjà plus de 20 ans qu’OVHcloud vous accompagne dans votre vie numérique, en défendant un cloud SMART.
Un cloud qui libère ses utilisateurs grâce à des solutions Simples, Multi-locales, Accessibles, Réversibles et Transparentes.

Cette conviction se traduit au quotidien avec des offres aux meilleurs ratios prix/performance du marché et nous ne reviendrons pas sur cette promesse cardinale.

Une inflation généralisée

En 2021 et surtout en 2022, une tendance mondiale a bousculé notre quotidien à nous tous : l’inflation. Avec un taux annuel qui atteint +8,9 % en juillet 2022 en Europe, dont +39,7 % pour les coûts d’énergie, l’inflation a un impact important touchant tous les secteurs d’activité, dont le secteur du numérique.

Grâce à la gestion de nos coûts d’énergie sur le long terme, en 2021, nous n’avons pas eu à changer nos prix. En revanche, fin 2022 et en 2023, une partie de nos couvertures d’achat d’énergie arrivent à leur terme et nous allons nous retrouver à acheter l’énergie à un prix plus élevé, celui du marché actuel en forte croissance sur tous les pays. C’est une augmentation significative que nous devons répercuter sur l’ensemble des services liés directement à la consommation électrique de nos infrastructures. Cette augmentation de prix va impacter les services nouvellement souscrits, mais aussi les services existants.

Concernant les services existants, nous allons procéder à une augmentation maîtrisée de nos tarifs de l’ordre de 10%. Elle sera effective au 1er novembre sur Public Cloud et au 1er décembre sur Baremetal (Serveurs, Eco, VPS), Hosted Private Cloud et les hébergements Web. Dans les prochaines semaines, nous allons vous informer plus précisément, service par service de tous les détails.

Un engagement inchangé

Le prix/performance fait partie de nos engagements fondamentaux et reste au cœur de notre proposition de valeur pour nos clients. Aujourd’hui, vous profitez déjà des économies que nous vous permettons de faire grâce aux innovations, comme le watercooling, la réversibilité, etc…. Ce nouveau contexte inflationniste ne change rien à nos objectifs de toujours : mieux vous servir et vous offrir une liberté totale dans l’usage avancé de nos infrastructures et services en y apportant encore plus d’innovations.

Octave Klaba et Michel Paulin

Let’s consider countries, companies — entire sectors, like the healthcare sector — which is so severely affected right now. What are the concrete consequences of concepts such as resilience, sovereignty, and trust?

The digital sector has by no means been spared from these unprecedented challenges, and there is good reason for this. In just a few days, radical transformations were imposed across the globe. Our working lives froze, and completely transformed at the same time. For better or for worse, digital tools are undeniably playing a vital role in this forced transformation. With remote working, remote teaching, alert systems, remote healthcare, online shopping, and much more, there are so many challenges and transformations that can be sudden.

Day after day, we are discovering that this accelerated digital transformation comes with many advantages, but it also comes with challenges — and even risks.

Protecting our freedom of choice

The jungle of digital solutions is so rich and overabundant, and lines of trust can be particularly hard to read — especially for a society that has never needed so many of these solutions before. The lively debate over traceability in contact tracing tools, like TraceTogether in Singapore, demonstrates that citizens are questioning the ethics of these digital tools. And they are right to do so.

• Where is our healthcare data stored, who can access it, and what can they use it for?
• Do we just have to accept that a select few players can sometimes keep their ground rules completely secret?

The recent scandals on the abusive usage of our personal data by social network providers show that these scenarios do not just exist in sci-fi shows like Black Mirror — they are already a reality.

At a time where many countries in Europe have lost control over their production and provisioning chain for equipment like masks and antibiotics, it is evident that the world of data is struggling with the same risks of dependency.

Initiatives for a trusted European digital ecosystem

At OVHcloud, like our customers and most of the other companies we work with, we believe that the ability to exercise our digital sovereignty is key for our freedom of choice. It is important for keeping control over our future, maintaining job security, and even keeping our way of life. These are all the challenges of a trusted cloud — a cloud guaranteeing European countries that strategic data is protected for their states, companies and citizens.

We strongly believe that in Europe, we must build a powerful ecosystem of players that share the same values and respect for data, reversibility, openness and transparency.

This belief is shared by a number of business owners, and by services across the European continent. The latest speeches from the European Commission demonstrate that this feeling is shared, so we need to take action.

There are different initiatives in place already; I’ll give three examples of the ones promoting digital sovereignty:

• Across Europe, there is the Gaia-X cloud project — a joint initiative from German and French public authorities, supported by their respective ecosystems. The goal of this cloud project is to define the axes of influence for a trusted European cloud. With integrators, manufacturers, players in the telecom sector, and institutions, this European ecosystem exists and is united by a strong set of values.
• In France, there is the Industry Strategic Committee, known as the Comité Stratégique de Filière (CSF). It was initiated by the Ministry of Finance and Industry, with players such as Atos, Oodrive, Outscale, OVHcloud, Scaleway and many others confirming their commitment to developing trusted solutions. Integration players such as CapGemini, GFI, Sopra and Thales have also worked hard to offer alternative, trusted sovereign solutions.
• And in terms of business owners — we can look at the success of the call to action from the 09th April for better digital sovereignty in Europe and across the globe in future* (on the initiative of Raphael Richard (Néodia), Pascal Gayat (Les Cas d’OR du Digital, Les Pionniers du Digital), Matthieu Hug (Tilkal), and Alain Garnier (Jamespot)). It has been signed by more than 100 business owners (including Octave and myself, on behalf of OVHcloud) and proves how important it is to be conscious of these topics, and how collective engagement is a key part of taking action together.

These European solutions exist, they are outstanding, and their ingenuity makes them able to compete with more dominant players. But solidarity between public authorities, business owners and large groups will be one of the keys to success for solid digital sovereignty. Public demand, the demand of large European groups, cooperation between research institutes and large teaching centres with start-ups are also key factors for accelerating this ethical ecosystem.

Everyone has understood that now is the time to take action, rather than simply identify issues. Octave Klaba, Founder and Chairman of OVHcloud, has always worked hard to defend strong values, and has succeeded in creating a European champion company — the only European cloud player that is within the top 10 worldwide.

To be responsible, we must take action.

OVHcloud’s commitment to investing and building trust for the future

Investing in our trusted infrastructures: We are investing in our own network of 30 datacentres, and our own telecom network with more than 20TB of transit. We are also investing in two trusted datacentres situated in France, reserved for European players with the most critical data — our public services, hospitals, and cutting-edge industries. Our datacentres hold the very highest certifications in terms of security (HDS, SecNumCloud in progress, ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018, PCI DSS, etc.).

Investing in a responsible, resilient model: We design our own datacentres, build our servers in France, and prefer short supply paths. This model guarantees employment in northern France, and also offers both traceability and auditability for our hardware — as well as improved availability.

Investing in an energy-efficient model: For over 15 years, OVHcloud has been developing water-cooling technologies for its servers, massively reducing its building and operating costs, and drastically limiting its energy usage.

Investing in innovation: Our belief is that innovation should be used for values of trust, and respecting personal and company data. OVHcloud invests a lot in research and development for solutions, particularly open-source projects — and also working with others to build standards that guarantee interoperability for cloud infrastructures.

But beyond investing in our own technology, we must also build an ecosystem of players that share the same values and respect for data, reversibility, openness and transparency.

Open Trusted Cloud — a catalogue of trusted solutions

We are urging software and SaaS publishers to work with us and help with the emergence of a new initiative: Open Trusted Cloud.

This program has a simple goal — to build an ecosystem of SaaS and PaaS solutions, hosted in an open, reversible cloud that guarantees the physical location of data.

OVHcloud guarantees hosted solutions:

• The choice of location for the storage and processing of data, ensuring compliance with local European legislations.
• Compliance with the CISPE European “code of conduct” on Data Protection¹.
• Compliance with the “Code of Conduct” on data reversibility facilitated by the European Commission (SWIPO IaaS²)
• If required, compliance for healthcare data hosting (HDS certification) and financial data hosting (SOC/ACPR/EBA compliance and PCI-DSS certification) in France, and in a certain number of European countries.
• And in certain cases, if solutions are referenced by the right organisations, C2 hosting for state services in France.

This way, it will offer a common platform of competitive solutions, marked with a label that enables everyone to use the best software solutions in the world — all while remaining protected by a trusted, sovereign infrastructure.

Join our Open Trusted Cloud initiative, and together we will prove that the future can be aligned in harmony with our values!

1 https://cispe.cloud/code-of-conduct/

2 Code of Conduct for Data Portability and Cloud Service Switching for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud services