This Tuesday, the 17th of October, Europe’s leading cloud service provider met with all the stakeholders in its sector at its annual OVH Summit. More than 2,000 people attended the opening plenary session, which was introduced by the CEO and Chairman of OVH, Octave Klaba.

This year, the buzzword surrounding OVH’s global expansion strategy is acceleration. Between 2016 and 2020, the group plans to invest 1.5 billion euros in the continued development of its cloud services across the globe. It is therefore entering into a new phase of its “Next Level” strategic plan, which has a target turnover of 1 billion euros over the next three years.

“OVH is the only European cloud company that is competing with global leaders”

Octave Klaba, CEO and Chairman of OVH, set the tone at the opening of the OVH Summit 2017 when he said: “OVH is the only European cloud company that is competing with global leaders”. This statement reflects the development actions that have already been announced by the group: new regions, new datacentres, new solutions, the planned recruitment of 1,000 staff members, and so on.

OVH always aims to provide a customer experience that meets the expectations of the market, and is aware of varying infrastructure and data processing requirements. That’s why it has decided to redefine its offering through three new brands that will become available in the coming weeks:

• OVHcloud aims to support companies looking for a flexible and scalable infrastructure based on the public, private or hybrid solution. This brand will include OVH’s high-performance servers for handling critical data.
• OVHspirit has been designed for companies and startups in their launch phase, as well as more established companies that would like to use the OVH Dedicated Servers and VPS for an improved price-performance ratio. Its solutions are adapted to the markets of each country and specific local techniques.
• OVHmarket is the group’s “Plug and Play” solution, offering complete and accessible services – such as web hosting, domain names, VoIP or xDSL – for all companies.

Octave Klaba also announced a new solution for large groups which will enable them to enjoy all the advantages of the cloud in completely private datacentres that are dedicated to one single customer.

Uniting the key players in the market to offer open, free and secure cloud solutions

A major announcement was also made at the 2017 OVH Summit regarding more open, reversible and interoperable cloud solutions. This initiative will enable organisations to focus on their digital strategies and the development of new services, without worrying about being trapped in silos at a later date.

Over the last few months, various cloud providers have been working to develop cloud service practices and regulations. They follow the principle that companies should be able to focus on their digital strategies and on developing new services without the fear of later discovering technological constraints that trap them in silos.

Today, OVH, along with more than 20 other cloud service providers who are committed to an open cloud, announced the launch of a new initiative: the Open Cloud Foundation. This new international organisation will span across the entire sector (providers, users, research centres, government bodies) and its technological layers (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS/Cognition). Its objectives: to promote technological standards (and establish any standards that are missing), participate in the public dialogue on regulations, and certify providers who conform with the Open Cloud values. These values are based on four key concepts:

• Data reversibility: giving customers the freedom to choose their infrastructure provider at any time, while retaining ownership of their data.
• Data interoperability: ensuring data is compatible with as many market solutions as possible.
• Data protection: full transparency on data location and associated regulations including provider-specific regulation.
• The issue of ownership of intellectual property rights to algorithms developed by a customer, using a provider’s infrastructure.

The Open Cloud Foundation will develop these practices and support the development of cloud service regulations if necessary. Over the next three months, the Open Cloud Foundation will establish its statutes, its governance and its roadmap for 2018.

The age of the hybrid cloud with adapted solutions and products is finally within reach

The progress that OVH is making towards an open and interoperable cloud is inspired by the expectations of the public and can be seen in each of the group’s innovations. Proof of this is in the announcement made by OVH’s technical directors on some of their leading innovations:

• Hybrid Cloud (HCX) technology now allows OVH customers to use “hot” migration of virtual machines from one datacentre to another or even from their own infrastructure, without any service interruptions. Customers who are not eligible for vRack Connect will be able to use HCX to connect their own infrastructures with any OVH datacentre around the world.
• It will now be possible to order dedicated servers on an OVH Cloud solution from the OpenStack API or from VMware Integrated OpenStack; the OVH Private Cloud will therefore become compatible with OpenStack.
• The new Functions-as-a-Service project enables customers to deploy a business function with just a few clicks thanks to Serverless architecture: Metrics, Logs Data Platform, Database-as-a-Service, etc.
• The next generation of Load Balancers – for distributing loads in public mode, as well as in private mode through the vRack – is available in the customer Control Panel, as well as the OVH and OpenStack APIs.
• To meet future needs, OVH is preparing to comply with all the required standards for developing artificial intelligence algorithms and the optimised infrastructures to support them – GPU, FPGA, NVMe – on the Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Dedicated Servers available throughout the world.
• The ISO 27001 certification, which is already attributed to the OVH Private Cloud, will soon be applied to the Public Cloud and Dedicated Server solutions.

To take the subject of security one step further, OVH announced the arrival of a new authentication level available for all customers worldwide: the YubiKey, based on the FIDO U2F, which was handed out in an exclusive preview during the Summit.

These announcements are in keeping with the path followed by OVH throughout this year in terms of:

• HDS certification (for hosting health data) and PCI DSS (obligatory for managing any banking data).
• GPU on Virtual Cloud Desktop for using high-performance graphics applications.
• Open sourcing of OVH tools (customer Control Panel, virtual assistant, CDS, OVH Labs), in a drive for continuous improvement. The group mostly relies on Open Source to develop its services and places this philosophy at the core of its strategy; the objective being to encourage IT stakeholders to test and share current technologies in order to stimulate innovation and accelerate the market.

OVH intends to standardise all future technology, without exception. It reaffirms its market vision and confirms its commitment to an open cloud that respects both data and customers. From the very beginning, OVH has made the voice of its customers the source of its development. This fifth Summit has put the group’s objectives into perspective like never before and confirms the success of OVH – a group that continues to build itself up as a global leader in cloud services.

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