#EcoEx21: OVHcloud ecosystem discusses ethics and sustainability at its annual international conference

Paris, November 16, 2021 - OVHcloud is bringing together around 130 customers, technology, industrial and commercial partners from its ecosystem for this year’s EcoEx21 virtual conference from 16 to 18 November. 

This international event, spanning Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific, is an opportunity for the European cloud leader’s key communities to demonstrate the power of their mobilisation around the shared values of respect for freedom, openness, and the ethical and sustainable use of technology. During the event, users, contributors, experts and partners will provide their testimonials and share their expertise over more than 50 sessions.

Michel Paulin, CEO of OVHcloud, and Octave Klaba, founder and president of OVHcloud, will open each day of the conference. They will bring together numerous guests, including Laurent Giovachini, Deputy CEO of the Sopra Steria Group; Amita Potnis, Director and Head of Research for the Global Trusted Practice at IDC; Nicolas Helleringer, CTO of Resilience; Ingrid Söllner, Chief Marketing Officer of Thetris; and Max Schrems, activist, lawyer, author and founder of NOYB –the European Centre for Digital Rights. Together, they will discuss the challenges currently driving the cloud market.

With a recent €350 million capital injection and a market capitalisation of almost €4 billion, OVHcloud is entering a new phase of its expansion. The success of its growth has reinforced trust in Europe's leading cloud provider and demonstrated the robust ecosystem behind it. 

Accelerating the Development of New, Value-Based Cloud Solutions

To meet its wide range of customer needs across digital-native companies, public and private organisations, DevOps, and partner resellers, OVHcloud continues to develop its four solution categories: Bare Metal Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud, Public Cloud, and Web Cloud, always at a predictable price and with a performance/cost ratio that is unique to the market.

OVHcloud is accelerating the integration of software technologies into its solution portfolio by combining its legacy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) expertise with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions.

OVHcloud is supporting companies' digital transformation through a set of ready-to-use tools in a number of ways:

OVHcloud is supporting companies' digital transformation through a set of ready-to-use tools in a number of ways:

• Through partnerships, such as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solutions with MongoDB, Aiven, and a collaborative development platform with Platform.sh;
• Through R&D, such as AI Notebooks or AI Training; and
• Through its acquisitions, including the launch of a High-Performance Object Storage offer following the acquisition of OpenIO.

OVHcloud will also create a platform of open cloud solutions available for users to adopt and enrich – sharing these solutions with organisations seeking higher standards and greater openness and reversibility in the PaaS model. 

OVHcloud guarantees its customers' data sovereignty by allowing them to choose the location of their data, protect them from outside interference, ensure compliance with local regulations, and commit not to exploit this data for the optimisation of its AI models or commercial purposes. The commitment was recently reinforced with the advent of Hosted Private Cloud solutions qualifying for SecNumCloud (ANSSI security visa), which testifies to the highest security and trust standard in Europe, G Cloud in the UK, C5 in Germany, and AGID in Italy.

The next step for OVHcloud is to ensure technological sovereignty for its customers by allowing them to control the underlying technology and thereby avoid technical lock-in situations. The interoperability and reversibility of OVHcloud solutions are built in line with recommendations by Gaia-X. During the event, Pierre Gronlier, CTO of Gaia-X will shed light on the initiative's recent progress in implementing a decentralised, open and sovereign data infrastructure.

Many OVHcloud partners will share their stories on these strategic topics, including Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware; Rob Bissett, Anthos Product Manager at Google Cloud; and Vincent Robert, Partner Project Manager at Platform.sh.

Getting Closer to International Customers, in Compliance with Local Legislation

To serve its customers worldwide, OVHcloud is growing its footprint by expanding existing data centres in Europe and Canada, as well as opening sites in new regions within the US, India, and Asia-Pacific. All while guaranteeing its customers operational sovereignty because they retain the freedom to choose where their data is stored. 

Furthermore, all OVHcloud solutions comply with current legislation, depending on the sector or location: GDPR for personal data, for example, or HDS for healthcare data. Raphaël-David Lasseri, Founder and CEO of Magic Lemp, will discuss the importance of this compliance during a session dedicated to healthcare data challenges.

To illustrate the guarantee of data immunity from extraterritorial laws, Cristina Guttuso, Chief Legal Officer of OVHcloud, will be hosting a conference on the new framework for European data transfers.

Offer Support Programs for Joint Success

To support its customers' growth, OVHcloud continues to strengthen and deploy its Partner Program, Startup Program, Marketplace and Open Trusted Cloud support programs worldwide, based on non-exclusivity of commitment. Mariana Caillaud, founder and CEO of Dolipharm; Rita Nazarian, Partner Manager of IPaidThat; Roberto Correnti, CTO of Full IP Solutions and many others will share their experiences on the benefits of the programs.

Pursuing a Comprehensive Innovation Policy Geared Towards Sustainability

As an integral part of its DNA, the OVHcloud vertical model is essential for sustainable innovation. The Group is paving the way towards an eco-responsible cloud through its R&D and collaboration with its providers (to aim for a transparent carbon footprint of server components), with players in the cloud market (notably through a shared commitment in the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact), and with its customers (via the provision of a carbon invoice calculator for their cloud consumption). 

To achieve its goal of "zero net emissions" by 2030 and anticipate new use cases requiring very high performance, OVHcloud is now testing an immersion cooling prototype. The concept is unique as it involves combining immersion cooling technology with the water-cooling technology that OVHcloud has been using for nearly 18 years. 

Thomas Arenz, Director of Marketing Communications and Strategic Business Development for EMEA at Samsung; Thibaut de La Bouverie, Partner, Cloud Transformation Lead at Deloitte; and Romain Rouvoy, Professor at INRIA, will discuss environmental issues in the cloud at a dedicated session.

Learn more about the Ecosystem Experience 2021.