Our various programs are the concrete embodiment of this conviction: grow and succeed together, while ensuring everyone remains in control of their data, innovates, and thrives in freedom.

OVHcloud Partner Program

Our partner program, deployed internationally, has been designed to support the digital transformation of companies and organizations. This year, against a backdrop of accelerating digital transformation due to the global pandemic, our collaboration with this powerful network has become even more structured.

These partners are very complementary to our business, as they are high added value resellers or service providers that wish to support their customers as they migrate to OVHcloud infrastructures. They provide advice, support expertise, or add their own technological building block. To support our partners in achieving their missions, we provide training, sales support and technical support for our solutions. In recent months, 300 partners have been trained through more than 50 sessions delivered by our experts.

In accordance with our commitments, OVHcloud’s Partner Program is non-exclusive. Our partners retain their freedom and can continue to collaborate with other cloud players on the market. But the offers or services they provide to our own customers through our partner portal must be based on our trusted cloud. We need to ensure that our customers, who would benefit from support from a partner, have their infrastructure compliant with their local regulations, and that their data remains sovereign.

For partners, joining this program represents a competitive advantage, as their customers are becoming increasingly aware of how to use a cloud that respects freedom and citizens’ rights. We also offer our partners localized support, specific to their geographical area, through our dedicated teams. They can also work within the program, which includes 3 different levels, and as many additional benefits for each. Following their growth, they have the opportunity to move from Standard to Advanced partners (one-third of our partners currently), to Strategic partners (which we will be opening very soon, for those who support large companies). This powerful network of partners contributes daily to strengthening our global ecosystem and spreading our shared values.

OVHcloud Startup Program

The startup support program was created to encourage the start-up of innovative projects. By supporting them from the earliest stages of their development, we help reveal their most disruptive aspects. This program is international in order to meet the high demand in all the countries where we are present. We support nearly 2,000 startups in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. This year, the program has been strengthened by opening up to scale-ups and diversifying its support offer. They can get financial support in the form of credits for our cloud infrastructure, technological advice to support their growth, and mentoring to support their business development. We want to act as a boost for these startups and scaleups by contributing to the development of their network and their reputation. In return, we benefit from their feedback, since they are often the first users of our new products and participate in our R&D cycle.

Our program stands out in the market for its lack of exclusivity, and we do not use technological locking (usually imposed for this type of support). When exiting the program, we do not force startups or scaleups to use our cloud infrastructures, nor do we take part in their capital. This unrestricted model guarantees them high reversibility and technological interoperability but by choosing to continue operating on our infrastructures means keeping control of their data.
This program supporting innovation is fundamental to the development of ecosystems of local entrepreneurs who share our values, in each of the countries in which we operate.

Open Trusted Cloud

In 2020, to address the confinement situation in multiple countries, we temporarily deployed an initiative called Open Solidarity. Many of our partners and customers providing remote working, education and healthcare solutions have joined this solidarity effort to help companies digitalize their data. With their trusted cloud-based solutions, they were able to support the digital transformation of companies concerned with protecting the security and confidentiality of their data while safeguarding their competitiveness.

Continuing this operation, we have developed the Open Trusted Cloud program to meet a real customer need: be able to easily identify solutions based on a trusted, open and interoperable cloud, The “Open Trusted Cloud” label acts as a true differentiator in their market, guaranteeing their commitment to respecting freedom and citizens’ rights.

Thanks to a number of contributors, we are continuing to develop this portfolio of labelled solutions, which are able to provide the best guarantees in terms of data protection. And we encourage all companies that share our commitments to join the Open Trusted Cloud program to spread the ethical cloud label around the world and use it as a lever for growth.

OVHcloud Marketplace

Recently launched and only available in France for the moment, the OVHcloud Marketplace was created to support the growth of SaaS and PaaS publishers hosted on our infrastructures. Today, it encompasses more than 250 solutions based on our trusted cloud. They are completely complementary to our solutions, and meet all companies’ needs for turn-key solutions such as collaborative suites, emailing, website creation, company social networks, cyber security solutions…

Beyond a catalogue of digital solutions, a community of sellers, united by the same commitments, is taking shape. A collaborative platform has just been deployed to unite the sales community and create synergies by facilitating exchanges, whether it is the sales community between itself to discuss technical convergence, common commercial interests, or even alliance on certain calls for tenders or our experts to support our new infrastructure solutions, features and services. In the context of the current health crisis, some of them have also spontaneously offered their preferential tariff solutions in solidarity to support hard-hit professionals and especially traders (you can find them in the solidarity selection section) .

As with all our other programs, we have adopted an alternative approach to the standard marketplaces on the market. No commercial exclusivity is imposed on our sellers, and we do not charge commission. Only a 3% transaction fee is charged to participate in the management costs inherent to the platform. Each of our sellers is also certified, so that all OVHcloud final customers in the OVHcloud Marketplace can benefit from secure transactions.

The OVHcloud Marketplace will be progressively deployed globally in 2021, to bring our visibility as a European cloud leader and global presence to our entire ecosystem. Pre-registration is open for all interested sellers outside of France.

To summarize

Like our ecosystem, our 4 programs are rich and diverse. Their growth is supported by market awareness for a more responsible cloud and by the commitment of each company that adheres to these programs. These companies want to drive change and make strong commitments to a cloud that is more ethical and respectful of citizens’ rights, particularly with regard to data protection. Our OVHcloud Ecosystem Experience, through many testimonials that you can find here, has proven that this ecosystem can grow in collaboration and trust. We are continuing our common efforts towards an ecosystem open to responsible innovation and respect for users, and we will continue to develop our programs to serve this belief.

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