Can you introduce Cryptomate, its industry, mission and values?

CryptoMate was founded by a team with deep experience in Fintech, Banking, Crypto, and Academia. We are capitalizing on a massive shift we identified: just as traditional fintech evolved from single services to Super Apps and finally to Embedded Finance, blockchain is now in its 3rd Wave.

This 3rd Wave moves past simple exchanges and TradFi apps to Embedded Stablecoins and AI Agents, allowing any company to offer sophisticated, global financial services.

Our mission is driven by a core belief: “no single bank fits everyone’s hand.” We are building the toolkit for a “constellation of micro-fintechs” across emerging markets. We believe financial inclusion must be profitable for local entrepreneurs to scale from the bottom up, rather than a top-down, high-cost model.

This vision is not theoretical; it’s a proven business model. We are already serving clients in 12+ countries. Our focus on providing real tools for local entrepreneurs has fueled a 10x increase in the last year, putting us on track to cross $100 Million in annualized transaction volume.

We have the team, we have the traction, and we are leading this new, decentralized financial revolution.

Guido De Luca (CTO) and Alan Boryszanski (CEO), co-founders of Cryptomate.

What were specific challenges you faced before joining OVHcloud’s Blockchain Accelerator?

Before the accelerator, our challenges were a direct result of our rapid 10x growth.

Technical: Our hybrid infrastructure (using one hyperscaler and one challenger) was becoming a bottleneck. We were running high-frequency financial processing, real-time AI agents, and deposit detection engines through multiple blockchain networks on systems that were difficult to scale. We faced performance issues and security complexities trying to manage both bare metal and managed cloud services at $100M in transaction volume.

Operational: We needed to deploy in new regions (Asia, Africa) for our clients, but our current setup made global, low-latency deployment slow and complex.

Financial: Our other provider’s costs were becoming unpredictable and a major budget drain. We needed a solution that offered the power of bare metal for our core processing without the punishing, variable costs of hyperscalers.

How did OVHcloud and the Startup Program help you overcome these challenges?

OVHcloud and its Startup Program were the direct solution to our scalability, cost, and performance crises.

Bare Metal servers are our key differentiator. They give us the raw, dedicated processing power needed for our financial engine and AI agents, something that was prohibitively expensive on our other hyperscaler provider. We get 100% of the CPU/RAM, which is critical for security and low-latency in our MPC wallet operations.

Predictable pricing was the biggest financial win. We’ve eliminated the unpredictable, variable costs of hyperscalers. Now our infrastructure budget is a fixed, manageable operational expense, allowing us to scale without fear.

We use vRack to build a secure, private global network connecting our nodes in Europe and North America, with a clear path to Asia. This solved our global deployment challenge.

The Startup Program’s support and credits were vital, giving us the financial breathing room to migrate and optimize our complex architecture without disrupting our 10x growth.

What tangible results have you achieved since collaborating with OVHcloud? How have these results helped to accelerate your growth or improve your product/service offering?

The results have been transformative. Since migrating to OVHcloud, we’ve reduced our monthly infrastructure costs by over 30%, moving from unpredictable hyperscaler bills to a fixed, manageable budget.

Crucially, by leveraging dedicated bare metal servers, we’ve increased our transaction processing speed by 50%. This isn’t just a metric; it’s a critical enabler. It allows us to securely handle our $100M annualized transaction volume and run our complex AI agents with the low latency our clients demand.

This collaboration directly accelerated our 10x growth. We now have a stable, high-performance global foundation, giving us the confidence to onboard larger clients and expand into new regions without fearing performance bottlenecks or budget overruns.

What are your ambitions for the future of your startup, and how do you see it evolving within the cloud ecosystem?

Our ambition is to become the global operating system for our “constellation of micro-fintechs,” scaling from $100M to billions in transaction volume.

Our future challenges are threefold: massive global scale, the heavy compute power required for our AI agents, and navigating complex data sovereignty laws as we enter new markets in Africa and Asia.

OVHcloud is our partner for sustainable success. Its powerful bare metal servers provide the cost-efficient engine for our AI and core transactions. Crucially, its global network and focus on data sovereignty give us a secure, compliant, and predictable foundation to scale globally, ensuring our future growth is both fast and financially stable.

What advice would you give to other growth-stage startups considering the cloud or joining a support program?

First, challenge your cloud stack. Don’t just default to the big hyperscalers because it’s easy. As you scale, their variable costs can kill your margins. For core, high-performance workloads—like our financial engine—dedicated bare metal servers provided us with 50% more speed at 30% less cost. Control your infrastructure economics before they control you.

Second, use startup programs for their expertise, not just their credits. The credits from the OVHcloud Startup Program were great, but it was their expert support in migrating our complex, high-volume architecture that was invaluable. Find a partner who invests in your success and understands your specific technical needs.

Conclusions

OVHcloud was the key to solving our scaling crisis. We cut our infrastructure costs by 30% and boosted transaction performance by 50% by migrating from unpredictable hyperscalers to their powerful bare metal servers. This partnership gave us the stable, cost-predictable foundation necessary to handle $100M in transaction volume and power our global AI.

Don’t let infrastructure costs limit your growth. We strongly urge other startups to join the OVHcloud Startup Program. Contact their team to build your own foundation for sustainable success.

If you’re a startup looking to transform your business, we encourage you to join the OVHcloud Startup Program or contact OVHcloud to discover how our solutions can support your journey!

OVHcloud is an industry leader for cloud infrastructure for blockchain and Web3 startups, delivering scalable, compliant, and secure cloud solutions made for decentralised applications, enabling the next era of digital trust.

Whether startups are building blockchain-native products or integrating decentralised technologies, our ecosystem offers the technical support, mentorship, and commercial resources they need to succeed.

Key partners in this accelerator that will help with your go-to-market needs are Degen House, Super Team Solana, Crypto Mondays, Alchemy and Dysnix.

Designed to be light-touch in terms of your time but high-impact in terms of value, the Blockchain and Web3 Accelerator offers everything that is OVHcloud (price/performance, energy efficiency, tech freedom, personal touch, decentralization and security of services) and more.

The 10-week program offers:

• €50k in free cloud credits to use on our Public Cloud solutions. This is in addition to Startup Program credits but the maximum total credits that can be allocated remains €100k.
• Deep-dives into blockchain, GTM strategies, sales training etc.
• Workshops on GTM, sales, investor readiness, and marketing to boost growth
• 1-on-1 mentoring from experts
• Engagement with corporates for possible POCs
• Engagement with Venture Capitalists (VCs) for possible funding

Up to 20 startups will be selected for the cohort of the Blockchain and Web3 Accelerator. Applications open on 4th of June, and the accelerator will run from 16 September 2025 to 20 November 2025.

Entries close on 7^th July 2025 (Apply NOW!) and selected participants will be announced on 23 July 2025.

The 10-week program is divided into 3 phases:

1. Phase I – Go-to-Market
   Focus on refining your product-market fit, marketing, and go-to-market strategy. You’ll work with our team to sharpen your positioning and business foundations.
2. Phase II – Build
   Deep dive into blockchain technology and cloud integration. You’ll collaborate with our Web3 and technical teams to optimize your infrastructure and unlock the full potential of OVHcloud solutions.
3. Phase III – Scale
   Prepare for investor engagement and scalable growth. This phase includes sales strategy and investor readiness, culminating in a final pitch at the OVHcloud Summit in Paris on 20 November 2025.

The accelerator program includes 1-on-1 mentoring from OVHcloud and external experts who will be matched with participants based on their needs. The program is designed to be agile, requiring only three hours a week or less, but can scale to support you as needed. It does also include a 1-year commitment to use OVHcloud’s products and solutions to ensure continuity after exit from the Accelerator.

Applications will need to meet the following criteria to be selected:

• You must be a Startup Program member that has been active in the program or as an OVHcloud customer for at least 1 month (not a member? Apply now)
• Your startup must be working with blockchain technology, but please note that we are unable to admit proof of work or mining blockchain creators into the program
• Preference will be given to Scale level members of the Startup Program

“Startups are an essential part of the blockchain ecosystem and one of the building blocks of the digital trust economy,” says Omar Abi Issa, Global Sales Director, Blockchain, Web3 and AI, OVHcloud. “Many startup ideas are created to solve business problems. However, most businesses and consumers experience these problems differently, and before businesses scale (and ‘go horizontal’) it’s important to learn enough about the market and audience so that your solution is truly innovative and useful.

As a former startup, OVHcloud understands what founders and their teams need, but as a global organisation which shares blockchain’s ethos of decentralisation, transparency and security, OVHcloud is in a unique position to help nurture and support the growth of tomorrow’s blockchain champions. We look forward to meeting latest group of companies participating in our accelerator, and are grateful to each and every application to the program.”

Startups like Bware Labs and Super Protocol have already enjoyed the benefits that the Fast Forward Accelerator offers.

“Our collaboration with OVHcloud has been very fruitful since we started using the platform and we are especially thankful to our account manager.” says Flavian Manea, CEO at Bware Labs

“We are very excited to work with OVHcloud, they are a reliable and high-performing partner. They have seamlessly delivered the growth of Super Protocol’s confidential computing infrastructure on which the future of Web3 is being built,” says Yulia Gontar, COO at Super Protocol

Sign up to the Startup Program and Blockchain and Web3 Accelerator today to benefit from a wealth of support – and scale your business faster.

Regardless of where your Windows or Linux servers are located, how confident are you that in the event of a major disaster, that your business can continue as usual?

While there are many awesome SaaS cloud solutions that don’t require any servers, the reality is that many companies (of all sizes and types) require their “own” server. It might be in the office, in co-located servers they own, or with a VPS or dedicated server with a provider like OVHcloud. There are many reasons, from personal preference to compliance to security to cost and compatibility. 

Read on to learn how custom requirements require creative solutions for Disaster Recovery (DR), and how to build confidence that your IT infrastructure can withstand major failures.

Case Study – RetailCo and Software Co

This article is based on our with two clients that had somewhat similar requirements, so we could reuse the designs our engineers created. Both have a mix of Windows and Linux servers.

Client #1 we’ll call RetailCo. They have over 12 retail “bricks and mortar” locations in Western Canada, with a growing online e-commerce capability. The core application runs on Windows servers with Microsoft SQL Server and Remote Desktop Services (RDS) clusters.

Client #2 we’ll call SoftwareCo. They have a large office in the Vancouver area with over 100 employees, many of who are software developers and creative artists in the mobile app industry. In the event of the failure of their office or downtown Vancouver hosted server, they wanted the confidence that business operations could continue with perhaps several hours of IT work to flip over to the OVHcloud servers in Quebec-Canada.

Backup and Recovery isn’t enough

Basic backup has been around for many decades. Traditionally, the storage method was via magnetic tape drives connected directly to each server. This transitioned to hard drives as capacity increased, prices dropped, and they become more portable with easy USB connections. And as high-speed internet became more common, then online cloud backups arrived.

From the new clients we talk to, pretty much everyone has backups. However, there are often major issues: the backups are often not automatic or tested. Somebody might be taking a tape drive or removable USB drive home every day or week in their purse, but it’s empty because the backup job failed and nobody watches it. Or, the drive may have corrupted.

It’s also very common that while the backup job may be monitored and validated as recoverable, that the recovery is very time consuming. It may require hardware to be available that is 100% identical to the original failed hardware. Or it may require a time consuming data or physical shipment of storage media to the recovery location. Having recoverable data and actually restoring operations is two very different things: with some backup methods, it could take a week to restore business! Even if the backup jobs have been reliably running every single hour.

With RetailCo’s previous managed hosting provider, backups were technically in place. However, it was a file/folder backup method only, and backups were only stored within the hosting provider’s facility. That meant that if a server failed, a technician would have to create a new virtual machine, install Windows, join to the Active Directory domain, install all the required software, manually configure everything, and only then restore the files to the new server. That process could take several days depending on the role and complexity of the failed server!

Image-based backups have existed for over 10 years now; these are very helpful but still do not guarantee a quick recovery. If the original hardware has failed for whatever reason, it can take weeks to procure a suitable replacement. It depends a lot on on the type of failure.

Replicating data to long-term “cold” or “cool” storage in Amazon or Azure can be very cheap and easy to do. However, getting the data back out and up and operational can be very time and labour-intensive. Clearly, creative solutions are required.

Every year brings new failure situations to account for

When it comes to IT and the ways that systems can fail, every year is a new opportunity for new types of failures. We have the classic threats of hardware failure, power outages, and earthquakes. Over the last couple of years, even here in Western Canada we’ve seen new situations:

• 100-year floods, trashing highways and transportation routes – I couldn’t leave my town
• Covid-19 and Remote work changing how systems are accessed
• Increased ransomware demands (over $1M) and cyber insurance requirements.
• Intelligent intrusions – hackers actively deleting backups
• Record heatwaves causing air conditioners to fail
• Human error, due to increasing IT complexity
• New regulations and compliance requirements in various industries

My conclusion is that we all need to be prepared for a variety of situations. 

Moving past Archaic Backups and Disaster Recovery to Business Continuity

Clearly, just having recoverable backups is not enough. We need to move the conversation past backups and Disaster Recovery to Business Continuity. In other words, what does the business require at a minimum to continue operations? How important are the data, applications, and digital communications? Is it acceptable for them to be completely unavailable for a week while they are being recovered? What is the true cost of downtime, considering not only expenses but lost revenue, reputation impact and damaged customer confidence?

In the case of RetailCo, they indicated that “continuation of business” means that stores are open and transacting. Perhaps not in a beautiful ideal scenario, but open for business and able to take payment. As their primary servers are in Vancouver, we configured a warm standby of their database and web portals in OVHcloud. In a failure of the primary servers in Vancouver, cashiers would be able to sell goods to clients using the web version of the point of sale software, even though the Remote Desktop Services (RDS) cluster was offline. The full restore of the environment would take a significant amount of time, however the core function of the business (store fronts and warehouse) would continue to operate while restoration took place.

For SoftwareCo, they didn’t have any significant software running on their Windows servers; primarily they were used for Active Directory authentication and internal DNS only. These servers are mission critical for remote VPN access and authentication. So, we setup active AD and DNS replicas in the OVHcloud, and replicated image-based snapshots of all servers and data to OVHcloud. This allowed for instant failover of the essential AD/DNS servers, with quick recovery of file data should that be required. All data was kept in the “private Cloud” – servers under the clients control. This fulfilled their requirement for georedundancy and client managed storage. 

These custom solutions provided all components: 

1. Fast recovery by using real-time data replication to servers located 4000 km away. The advantage is that it doesn’t matter how often we’re backing up or how long it takes to recover. 
2. Frequent incremental data backups to multiple locations (onsite and offsite)
3. Image-based drive backup technology for ease of restoration
4. CyberSecurity data protection through encryption and different chains of command and control

The following diagram provides an illustration of the overall design for the RetailCo business continuity design.

Our checklist for high confidence server backups

1. Executive written approval on backup frequency and recovery time objectives. For each service and server:
   1. Agree on how often backups need to be created. This is called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Example: your website may not change often, so a monthly backup is sufficient.
   2. Agree on the maximum time it must take to recover. This is called the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Example: The website doesn’t change often, but it’s critical for sales and marketing so must be restored to service within 2 hours.
   3. Agree on retention policies. This may impact storage costs. Example: for the website, we only need to keep a backup as old as 3 months ago. Example: for the accounting database, we need to be able to recover data from 1 year ago.
2. Design and implement a backup system that actually fulfills the approved RTO and RPO strategy.
3. On a regular basis, test the backups to confirm they are recoverable in the agreed-upon objectives.
4. On a regular basis, audit all IT systems (including Shadow IT services) for new data that may not be sufficient backed up.
5. Have multiple local backups, for the quickest recovery.
6. All backups run automatically, with health monitoring and alerting on failures.
7. Security controls are in place, so that ransomware, malware, viruses, and hands-on attackers can’t delete either local or remote backups.
8. Encryption is in place for backup data at rest (onsite and offsite) and in transit (whether USB drive or Internet upload).

Why OVHcloud is great to work with?

1. Costs: Dedicated hardware is more under the client’s control and there is additional cost for testing or production use.  It’s a happy medium between the cost savings of CapEx vs Lease vs Pay-as-you-go.  For clients who need multiple virtual servers with lots of CPU and RAM, OVHcloud generally provides more bang for the buck then AWS or Azure.
2. Ease: The addition of new hardware is a few clicks in the ordering page, unlike with client owned datacenters equipment where it can take months to order and install new hardware. The OVHcloud portals and dashboards are also much easier to navigate then AWS and Azure, which can get quite complicated.
3. Real hardware: with direct access to the hardware, the only limit to the number of virtual machines is the amount of RAM and CPU in that OVHcloud dedicated server.
4. Data Sovereignty: OVHcloud is a Non-US Cloud service provider and the Data Centers are in Quebec & Europe.
5. Predictable pricing : OVHcloud provides cloud services with simple billing and no hidden costs. No Ingress-egress Fees for customers wanting to move data around.

Our approach – vendor-neutral

Our approach is not a pure-cloud one; we prefer being more pragmatic about it. We’re happy to design Multicloud solutions but if possible it’s great to stay vendor neutral. Being locked into one ecosystem can be problematic for some companies. Thus, we have maintained the people, skills, tools, and process to support a variety of platforms and configurations.

Crafty Penguins – Linux Managed IT services

Our Crafty Penguins division specializes in Linux consulting and server management. Check out the technology stack and service pricing pages to learn more. Many clients start with a Discovery Project for an assessment and health check of their current servers.

Kerkhoff Technologies – Managed IT Services & IT Consulting

Our Kerkhoff Technologies division provides Managed IT Services for clients using Windows & Linux systems.  Check out our service and technology stack pages to learn more.  Need an assessment, security review, migration or new server setup? Reach out and schedule an introductory call.

In order to make life easier for our hosting and integration users, we recently finalised our Bare Metal Cloud universe, with high added-value infrastructure and storage services. This new category of products is called Managed Bare Metal, to distinguish itself from dedicated Bare Metal servers that are fully managed by our users.

We operate Managed Bare Metal for them, allowing them to benefit from our automation, orchestration and management capabilities 24/7, while maintaining independence and control over their infrastructures. Therefore, with the enhancement of other virtualisation and storage solutions, our first Managed Bare Metal offering is called “Managed Bare Metal Essentials, powered by VMware®”.

A new generation of Bare Metal

This first building block is based on VMware, and further demonstrates our capacity for innovation and standardisation, thanks to our ecosystem of technological partners. Having been one of the first European cloud providers to launch a Hosted Private Cloud solution using VMware, our service is now available to companies familiar with Bare Metal, who want a ready-to-use, resilient, scalable infrastructure at the best price. These companies no longer want to worry about implementing and managing their infrastructure, instead preferring to focus on their added value and developing their business applications.

Combining the best of both worlds – Bare Metal and virtualisation by VMware – this solution simplifies the management of virtual machines and associated resources, while also enjoying high availability. In just a few clicks, users can deploy, move, size and back up their virtual machines. The Managed Bare Metal Essentials offer helps companies to both save time and increase productivity.

Scalability and data governance

This range is composed of 3 packs:

• The Essentials ESS64 Pack, based on two Intel Xeon E5 2689 V4 single processor hosts with 64 GB of memory and two 2 TB SSD datastores. This infrastructure is fully dedicated and redundant. The bandwidth of the infrastructure’s hardware as well as the public bandwidth is 3 Gbit/s and is unlimited. The VMware Enterprise Plus licence is also available in this pack.
• The ESS128 Essentials Pack and the ESS256 Essentials Pack will be available soon, with an Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 processor and 128 GB of memory for ESS128 and an Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 dual processor and 256 GB of memory for ESS256. The rest of the pack is identical to the ESS64.

Resources can be reduced or increased depending on the workload. Users can add or delete hosts and datastores directly from the control panel. Additional hosts may be the same or different from the starter pack hosts; for example, ESS128 or ESS256 hosts can be added to an ESS64 Essentials pack. The additional datastores have capacities ranging from 3 TB to 36 TB. New resources are delivered in 30 minutes, and billing is delivered either on a monthly or hourly basis, clearly explained without any unexpected charges.

There are many VMware features available with our packs:

• vMotion to hot-migrate virtual machines without service interruptions
• vSphere High Availability (HA) for automatic reboots in the event of a hardware failure
• DRS (Dynamic Resources Scheduling) that automatically harmonises resource usage to avoid overload
• Fault Tolerance allows VMware to automatically send the virtual machine to a passive host in the event of a host failure, thereby anticipating any service interruptions
• vROps (vRealise Operations) to continuously optimise performance, management, and capacity planning

And additional options are available:

• Automatic backup via our “Veeam managed backup” solution, to ensured that your data is backed up and restored in the event of a problem
• Floating IPs for more flexibility in developing or releasing your applications

Our Managed Bare Metal Essentials offer has been rolled out worldwide, and is now available in several of our datacentres: in France (RBX, SBG), the UK (ERI), Germany (LIM), Canada (BHS) and the United States (HIL, VIN). Users can choose where their infrastructures are hosted, according to their business issues or the local regulations they want to comply with. They also get a ready-to-deploy environment that is fully operational in just a few hours, and can be fully customised to suit their needs.

The Managed Bare Metal Essentials, powered by VMware® offer is further testimony to how we listen to our users and pay attention to how they consume, use and manage their infrastructures. It has been designed in line with our values, and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to simplifying the deployment and management of cloud infrastructures, with simple billing and interfaces that provide the best customer experience, while respecting their fundamental rights and freedoms, including their data protection rights.

There is no other equivalent on the market, and it paves the way for the new managed infrastructure ranges planned for 2021. These new ranges will be available at a very competitive price/performance ratio and will have our two key differentiating markers – reversibility and interoperability – that our users expect. More than ever in 2021, our ability to innovate by providing an ecosystem, and our ability to understand and anticipate the market, will prove to be our best assets.

The Beginning of a Revolution

OVHcloud offers a wide portfolio of cloud products and solutions across its four universes (Web Cloud, Bare Metal Cloud, Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud). The cloud we deliver is always designed and developed with our customers in mind, and we’re always looking to understand their business so we have a better idea of their challenges.

We started our discussions on the Premium Bare Metal Cloud market back in 2016. At that time, we received feedback from a few customers regarding our price positioning on this particular range of powerful servers, which meet very high storage requirements. Our bare metal products were simply too expensive in comparison to what they were willing to pay for. We then worked with two customers in particular. Since they were open to share their costs with us, we were able to project their economic model onto our business model. These two customers hosted their own services via colocation, without a local team available 24/7, and they had a low-capacity internet network. They invested in their own servers by calculating their prices across a 5-year period. Once we performed this analysis, we realised that we could offer them these powerful servers for a lower, much more competitive price. But to meet this challenge, we would need to do some major work that would probably take several years.

A New Business Model

Our first project involved completely restructuring the mathematical basis of our business model, which we used to calculate our prices. We started this in 2017, and it took three years.

In our first year, we reorganised the company and created Units. Each of the Units is a kind of small business within OVHcloud. It contributes to our collective success by managing responsibilities corresponding to its expertise, and by contributing to our strategic plan. It is led by a Unit Lead, and has a roadmap to deliver.

In the second year, we created P&Ls for each Unit so that they could model the projects in their roadmap, through real costs generated compared to the expected benefits. To provide them with this analytical framework, we had to restructure our finances. This involved dividing the company’s overall P&L into several micro P&Ls. This meant we could allocate costs to the right Units and create an internal billing workflow. We were then able to calculate the revenue of each Unit by reconciling the revenue generated by customer billing with the revenue generated by the internal chargeback for other Units, while integrating the associated costs (teams, licences, etc.). We then had the margins released by each Unit.

In the third year, we linked all these metrics to financial statements, and made their KPIs available to Units in real time. The purpose of deploying these financial dashboards was to better manage the company’s efficiency — but more importantly, to empower the teams. By aligning financial monitoring tools with the new organisation, Units were able to produce more reliable forecasts, better anticipate risks, and better project their investments and salary expenditure. For the company, it was also a way of ensuring that every project created value for OVHcloud, as well as continuing to ensure that our development remained profitable, balanced and sustainable for our competitiveness and independence. From the customer’s point of view, this cost-conscious culture would mainly lead to even bigger price reductions.

In the digital world, economies also rely on two shifts: reducing fixed costs (by increasing sales volume) and reducing variable costs (by automating tasks through software, robotic systems, and artificial intelligence). Investing massively in automation is a crucial challenge for a cloud provider like ourselves. Through massive investments, we improved quality (fewer bugs, simplified procedures, faster service delivery), and we were able to carry out more operations per day, without increasing the size of the Units. This meant the Units no longer had to do repetitive tasks, and they could instead focus on the added value they needed to bring to our customers. We do this by following the principles of BFLNT, which I described in a previous blog post.

Finally, this combination of operational and financial efficiency — as well as the level of automation in Units — helps us develop increasingly cost-effective solutions, and provide even more value for money to our customers.

CAPEX is Value

To support their ambition, companies that incur a high CAPEX — through spending high amounts on real estate or equipment investments — are never highly valued on the financial market. To secure these large investments, they often operate complex — even opaque — financial schemes that are perceived as too much of a risk.

For OVHcloud, these large sums are the foundation of our virtuous model — investing in building and improving our datacentres, renewing our production equipment, and acquiring new manufacturing premises. Our business model completely demystifies these massive investments, because it ensures returns on investment by design. Our ability to invest by generating profitability has enabled us to raise capital in 2016 ($279 million from KKR and TowerBrook) and even raise debt at the end of 2019 ($976 million). CAPEX is our main vector for creating value. We must constantly invest in future innovations and infrastructure to ensure our sustainability and competitiveness.

With all the work we have done over the last three years, we have also been able to make huge changes to our business model. With the sophisticated analysis we gained, we can now calculate a server’s price based on multiple variables like commitment time, order volume, server type, and investment spending on the infrastructure and the business itself. This new financial model is internally called “Jackpot”, as any reduction in our CAPEX or OPEX (operating expenses) will certainly lower the price for our customers. And in the event that we don’t provide the price expected — which means that our CAPEX or OPEX solutions are not sufficiently optimised — we are always looking for where we can innovate, and what level we need to disrupt. Because if we improve our costs, we reduce our prices rather than increasing our margins. This constant self-reflection through innovation is what enables us to offer customers better prices, as we will soon be doing with a Premium Bare Metal Cloud.

New resource usage methods

Our ambition is to become a global expert in Premium Bare Metal Cloud. We want to shake up the market from 350 to 2,500 dollars per month (for the top-range premium servers) and become a benchmark, as we are already doing for entry and mid-range servers. Customers who need the most power and capacity will start to notice the first effects of our strategy. To better serve their challenges, by the end of 2020 they will see our public prices drop. But we will maintain the same high performance. In addition to our industrial model, which is unique in its total control and enables us to adapt constantly, it is mainly our new “Jackpot” business model that has helped us go even further in recent months. And based on this new model, we have reviewed everything — servers, network, energy and water-cooling. Now more than ever, we are a price leader by design.

By allowing us to follow product life cycles with greater finesse, our new financial model has also enabled us to review our commitment models. Before the end of the year, we will offer more competitive prices on longer-term commitments. In addition to the monthly payment models already available, i.e. with no commitment or with a commitment of 6, 12 or 24 months, we will also offer commitment plans over 3, 4 or 5 years. Our prices will be even better for customers who are able to commit to both volume (3 or 12 racks with 48 or 96 servers) and duration (3, 4 or 5 years). In the future, our customers will also be able to get Bare Metal prices per hour, billed per second.

Finally, for customers who need a lot of server racks and don’t want to manage their infrastructure, we can already deliver private spaces in our datacentres, with 12, 24 or 48 racks* equipped with cameras, badges and logs. This use case not only meets the needs of Bare Metal Cloud customers, but also Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud customers in “private region” mode. From 100 racks onwards, we are able to deliver true private datacentres in third-party buildings (customers’ premises)*, wherever they are in the world. This significantly reduces their costs. For these datacentres, we deploy our industrial and technical expertise, including our exclusive water-cooling technology, and all of our hardware innovations — including the very latest technology on the market. We also manage all software layers and their lifecycles.

A Global Impact

The purpose of this blog post is not to detail our future offerings, but to explain the long journey that has led us to drop our prices on Premium Bare Metal Cloud. But if you follow my Twitter account (@olesovhcom), you may have seen some previews of them — because I share information about our work regularly.

In all, OVHcloud will soon offer around 300 Bare Metal Cloud models! This is a very wide range, and our marketing teams have taken on the impressive challenge of offering a simplified browsing experience, so that you can find exactly what you need. In late October 2020, the menu name will change from “Server” to “Bare Metal Cloud”. This will be the first step in a transition that will take place in the coming months, with a much more usage-based approach, such as virtualisation, storage, deep learning, databases, etc. The aim is to make your journey easier, and help you easily pick the models that best suit your needs.

As internal customers, our three other cloud universes (Web Cloud, Public Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud), which all rely on our Bare Metal Cloud infrastructures, will also benefit from these innovations and new prices. Before making this global impact, we needed to review the fundamentals of the cloud. Expect some great announcements in 2020-2021!

To find out more, head to the OVHcloud #EcosystemExperience, our new virtual event, on the 03rd, 04th and 05th November.

We will prove to you in concrete terms that by thinking out of the box through disruption and creating a solid ecosystem, we are helping to make OVHcloud a genuine alternative in the cloud industry every day.

Octave Klaba

Founder & Chairman OVHcloud

*Interested? https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/contact-sales/