Open Innovation
Helping everyone freely innovate
We are building a trusted, secure open cloud that is fairer and more responsible, so that innovation can work for everyone.
Collaborating
At OVHcloud, we want to help everyone freely innovate, using the open cloud we have been developing.
To this end, we have brought together an ecosystem of partners and customers who use our transparent, reversible and interoperable cloud. This cloud is based on our in-house expertise, combining our industrial disruptions with our ability to develop and automate trusted open cloud solutions.
Collaboration is key here. We rely on the innovations of our technological partners, our network of partners and our Marketplace sellers who bring their own added value in terms of consulting, support, technological building blocks or packaged solutions.
In 2020, we went further - joining the Open Invention Network (OIN).
As part of this intellectual property fund of companies from around the world, we are pooling our Linux patents to protect the open-source operating system from legal action. We license our patents, without fees, on the same footing as all other international members. By sharing all of our software patents, we go even further in defending open source values and protecting a shared heritage.
Finally, as a founding member of Gaia-X, we want to foster innovation and collaboration to build an open European digital ecosystem and a data infrastructure based on openness, transparency and interoperability.
Industrializing
To create value for our customers, we constantly design industrial solutions that are increasingly intelligent, frugal and eco-efficient so that we can integrate them into our data centers.
We continuously optimize our power distribution and cooling systems, for example we industrialized our water cooling early on. As with most of our innovations, we transposed and adapted what was already working (in this case, using water’s heat transfer properties to cool desktop computers) to innovate and create our own data center solutions.
Since 2001, as part of our Product Hacking initiative, we have also been designing our servers’ hardware architecture by selecting or developing components. Thanks to this Made in OVHcloud design, we can constantly optimize the performance of our Bare Metal Cloud, which in turn supports the performance of our Hosted Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Web Cloud.
Multiple innovations, on both our infrastructures and our servers, also allow us to reduce our costs. As a result, we are able to offer the best price/performance ratio – a key differentiator enabling us to become the leading European cloud provider with a global presence.
Guaranteeing software independence
We always develop solutions following market standards, working closely with VMware, Veeam, Zerto and many other companies. Our customers are often familiar with these standards, so they can use them, too. In addition, our solutions are mainly based on open source technology.
Indeed, we have always practiced open, collaborative development, which allows our ecosystem to access the source code of the software solutions or components that we regularly release on GitHub. We open many of our own projects to the open source community. Recently we have released projects, including The Bastion security infrastructure, the Kubernetes operator for Harbor and the Erlenmeyer and Catalyst tools for TSDBs.
We have also joined communities, including The Linux Foundation (in 2018, with the launch of the Ceph Foundation), and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (in 2019). As a result, our developments are never exposed to lobbying issues, but instead are guided by independent contributors or the board members of various foundations committed to open source.
Our active participation in open source communities guarantees our users transparency, reversibility and interoperability in our cloud solutions.
Our Patent Pledge: our promise to share
In 2011, with our strong international expansion, we filed our first patents, primarily in the hardware sector. Then, from 2017, as our growth came with an increase in expertise, we began filing patents in more diversified areas. We wanted to assert our intellectual property to prevent other companies from preempting our industrial innovations and not claiming the rights. This strategy was clearly defensive, at a time when our innovations were being deployed in different datacenters around the world. However, as we remain focus on open innovation and to provide further assurance to open source contributors, we are making our technologies even more accessible by publicly sharing our patents under certain conditions.
This Patent Pledge is a guarantee that we will not challenge any open-source software that may be linked to any of our existing or future software patents.
It consolidates our patent-opening strategy to enrich the cloud market and strengthen our technology leadership. Above all, it protects the open source community.