Michel Paulin says UK and European providers should get a bigger slice of global cloud spend, hopes for US-style public sector support
OVHcloud's priorities in 2023
The French cloud computing firm started the year strong by gaining six new Database-as-a-Service solutions through a partnership with Finnish software company Aiven.
The Paris-based group declared it was going to market with a new suite of enterprise file storage services with US vendor NetApp shortly after.
OVHcloud's growth was not restrained to only channel partnerships, boasting the acquisition of Paris and San Francisco-HQ ForePaaS and expanding its footprint with a new €30m data centre in France.
"Our second priority this year is to continue to expand internationally. Today we have operations and data centres in four continents," Paulin told CRN.
"We will extend also with the new data entre in Toronto, Canada, new data centres in the US, and we will launch 15 new data centres in next two years to be able to continue to grow and to accelerate our growth into these regions."
OVHcloud managed to escape being curbed by last year's economic turmoil that has seeped its way into 2023, exceeding sales targets in its FY22 results with revenues of €788m, up 18.8%.
The company attributed its progress to the "overall cloud market dynamism", in particular the significant growth opportunity in public cloud and private cloud.
Lifting the lid further on OVHcloud's business strategy for 2023, Paulin in fact said the group's plan has not altered since its origin following the successful €460m IPO in October 2021, and reaffirmed his trust in the cloud, from which the company clearly continues to reap the rewards.
"We believe the need for cloud solutions will remain and will remain very strong. OVHcloud has most, if not all, of the attributes to be able to address what the public sector and bigger corporations, tech companies and SMEs need to be able to do so," he told CRN.
"We will continue to apply what were our key priorities for the next four or five years. The main one is to continue to innovate and to continue to propose new solutions with a specific focus on platform as a service."
OVHcloud on price rises
Another detail which may have helped the group maintain revenue growth last year was its move to increase prices for existing services by 10%. The rises were in line with industry-wide increases and aimed to mitigate inflation on overall cost.
On how the global economy may impact OVHcloud in 2023, Paulin unfortunately doesn't possess a crystal ball.
"It's very difficult to make a prediction of what's going to happen in 2023. We decided to increase our pricing because we want to maintain the right level of productivity to continue to invest, recruit and to innovate," he said.
"I still do believe that inflation will stay in 2023 and potentially we might have some adjustments."
This article first appeared in Computing's sister site CRN.
