OVH, France’s and Europe’s biggest cloud success, has raised €267 million from a bond issue and bank credit with one principal objective..to go toe-to-toe with the US cloud giants.
During their recent annual conference this past October, OVH’s leadership made no secret their ambitious agenda to quickly expand abroad and move closer to the top of the global cloud leader list. They already have 17 datacenters, including one in Canada to cover North America. However, they’re looking to expand their footprint by establishing a new site in the west of the US (Vancouver or Oregon are possibilities) and in Singapore to address opportunities in Asia. Reinforcing their position in Europe continues to be in the cards where the will further support the 17 countries they already cover with a new datacenter set to open in Germany in the next 2 yrs.
Although OVH knows that moving up the cloud leader ranks will not be easy, Amazon for example is “only” 12x larger than them in terms of number of servers, they’re encouraged by their #3 global position in terms of number of hosted apps, the fact that they’re approaching IBM in terms of number of servers, and they’re projected €230 million in revenues expected for this year.