Startup highlight: Interview with Thomas Foricher, CTO at Silbo
At OVHcloud’s Startup Program, we are proud to support innovative startups like Silbo that are reshaping industries.
Today, we speak with Thomas Foricher, CTO of Silbo, a groundbreaking company transforming patient flow management in healthcare.
Can you introduce Silbo and its mission?
Silbo was founded in 2018 by Antoine Bohuon with a clear mission: to serve those who care for others by enabling healthcare professionals to focus on their core mission—delivering quality care.
Our platform addresses the complexities of hospital bed management, facilitating the allocation of beds to patients, improving information sharing among healthcare providers, and optimizing patient trajectories. By offering an intuitive, all-in-one solution, Silbo empowers hospitals to efficiently manage patient flows while enhancing the quality of care provided to patients.
What challenges did Silbo face before partnering with OVHcloud?
Our primary need was to find a sovereign hosting provider with strong expertise in modern technologies such as Kubernetes, MongoDB, and Redis. Additionally, compliance with HDS certification and a guaranteed SLA were critical due to the nature of our work in healthcare.
Managing and securing servers at scale requires highly specialized expertise. With increasing technical interdependencies, ensuring constant security and availability is a dedicated profession. For us, relying on experts like OVHcloud allows us to focus on what we do best—improving healthcare efficiency.
How did OVHcloud help Silbo address these challenges?
OVHcloud was the clear choice. It is the only hosting provider in France that offers a public cloud with high-quality services, combined with HDS and SecNumCloud compliance. Additionally, its strategic vision of deploying local datacenters across Europe aligns with the needs of countries seeking to keep sensitive data, such as health information, close to healthcare institutions.
We use several managed services, including Kubernetes, Object Storage, MongoDB, and Redis. These services are comparable to those offered by other providers, but OVHcloud’s standout feature was Rancher, which we beta-tested. Rancher allowed us to monitor on-premise Kubernetes deployments effectively, with support from OVHcloud’s engineering team.
With the help of OVHcloud experts, we improved our knowledge of Kubernetes. By adopting their best practices, we successfully deployed Kubernetes on-premise and leveraged Rancher for effective monitoring. This expertise has significantly enhanced our ability to scale infrastructure while maintaining high security and reliability.
What tangible results has Silbo achieved through this partnership?
Since partnering with OVHcloud, we’ve seen our infrastructure costs cut in half compared to other providers without public cloud capabilities. Our platform is now faster, providing a noticeably better experience for end-users.
From a development perspective, on-demand Kubernetes allows us to execute large computational jobs and parallelize analyses. This accelerates our deployment workflows and optimizes our processes.
By outsourcing infrastructure management to OVHcloud, we’ve freed up resources to focus on developing new features and enhancing our platform. This enables us to deliver even greater value to our users and maintain our commitment to innovation.
What’s next for Silbo?
Our ambitions are closely aligned with OVHcloud’s vision: expanding across Europe while providing secure, localized services compliant with both international and local regulations.
One of our main challenges will be managing multiple instances that comply with the specific regulations of different countries. Cloud solutions will be key in helping us navigate this complexity while maintaining high standards of security and efficiency.
What advice would you give to startups exploring cloud solutions?
Focus on two key aspects: identifying your user’s problem and solving it as simply and efficiently as possible.
Leverage existing, standardized solutions wherever possible. Avoid reinventing the wheel—your priorities should always align with your clients’ needs, not internal assumptions or preferences.
Join the OVHcloud Startup Program
Silbo’s success highlights the transformative power of leveraging OVHcloud’s Startup Program.
Are you ready to take your startup to the next level? Join a growing community of innovators and benefit from tailored cloud solutions, expert guidance, and a global ecosystem.
Learn more about OVHcloud’s Startup Program and get started on your journey today!
Leonard began his career as an engineer at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science. In 2014, he founded a healthtech startup and has since dedicated over 10 years to supporting innovative projects. His efforts have focused on helping early-stage startups at Cap Digital and high-growth scaleups at the French Tech Mission, under the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance, Industrial and Digital Sovereignty.