Numergy, one of the two “French Cloud” providers that came out of Andromede, is finally launching a standard, direct-to-customer cloud offer. After having focused until now on custom offers available only via select partners/distributors, this new offer will be self-service, available directly on their site.
The primary target for this new offer will be those needing more of a “light-weight” cloud environment, so according to Numergy, “startups, independent developers and individual users”. With this new focus on startups and developers, they have clearly made the decision to compete head-on with stalwart Amazon Web Services (AWS), other big American providers such as Microsoft Azure, and other key French providers such as well-known Oxalide and fast-growing startup Clever Cloud. To reinforce the offer, they offer a SLA guaranteed at 99,9%. You can check-out their pricing here which ranges from small (.068€ HT / hr 1 VCPU 2 Go RAM) to large + (.200€ HT / 2 VCPU 8 Go RAM). In addition, they offer up to 10 Mbps of bandwidth free with an increasing pricing scale starting with 160€ for 20 Mbps. Finally, their offer supports various OS including Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Windows Standard or Enterprise, and MySQL.
As we’ve discussed in the past, there’s still a great deal of scepticism about whether or not the government’s ordained French cloud providers will succeed. Their primary argument has focused around data sovereignty, but, particularly for startups and developers, things like reliability, flexibility, services offered, latency, pricing etc. are likely to be of much greater importance. In addition, there are several solid French cloud providers already on the market (see above), so it’s not like there aren’t already ‘sovereign’ offers around. In other words, they’re going to have to come up with a really compelling argument (beyond the one they’re making currently) to convince startups and developers in particular to switch. With Amazon still leading the way and recently announcing certain price reductions on AWS, Microsoft well-positioned to gain ground for Azure given their increasingly strong support of the startup ecosystem, providers such as IBM investing heavily in building their own ‘French clouds’, and current French providers continuing to hold their own in a competitive space, Numergy and Cloudwatt have a pretty daunting challenge in front of them.