November 23, 2017

OVH, VMware announce next generation cloud for small business

Launch signals the invasion of french giant OVH in the U.S. market; aims to leverage large data center footprint.

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French hosting giant OVH in partnership with VMware has launched its next-generation Hosted Private Cloud offerings for the US market. This much-anticipated launch has followed the acquisition of VMware’s vCloud business in April 2017. With an aim to leverage VMware’s presence in the U.S market, OVH plans to target small and medium businesses by providing them with cloud solutions that make workloads flexible.

OVH aims to meet this goal by providing enterprise-level private cloud, disaster recovery and hybrid cloud services. The updated product line includes an enterprise dedicated private cloud built on VMware’s software-defined data center and the latest processors from Intel that provides companies physically isolated computing environments not shared with other companies.

The service will be available starting in the Eastern U.S. region along with the United Kingdom and Germany, with more regions to be added in the first half of next year. OVH is offering its hosted private cloud service coupled with VMware’s new HCX technology announced in September, which allows customers to move virtualized computing jobs among private data centers and OVH’s public cloud.

CEO and President of OVH US, Russell P. Reeder explained:

Businesses need solutions that scale dynamically and are supported by top-tier customer service experts to meet their evolving private cloud demands. Businesses are dynamic. Cloud providers must support business change as rapidly as it occurs. OVH works with our customers to deliver the best-fit infrastructure and software options they need to help them operate better, faster, and more efficiently.

Reeder also feels that the cloud market in the small- medium business industry is ripe for disruption and it is only a matter of time before they duplicate this with massive global expansion.

Research Manager at 451 Research, Liam Eagle opined:

OVH has long been a leader in cloud and hosting services across Europe, known for unique energy efficiency in its data center operations and competitive pricing. There is an opportunity to win market share and impact the existing cloud space through a combination of proven leadership and true technology differentiation.

With this strategic move, OVH aim to scale their data centers from 27 to 50 in the next three years with $1.5 billion investment.

OVH’s launch has sparked interest in the US web services industry and it will be interesting to watch how other cloud players like Amazon and Microsoft react to the challenge.