European cloud specialist OVHcloud has entered into negotiations for the full acquisition of German company gridscale, a software provider specialised in hyperconverged infrastructure.
This strategic acquisition will mark another important milestone for OVHcloud by enabling the group to significantly accelerate its geographical deployment, and to enter the emerging, very fast-growing market of edge computing.
gridscale offers an innovative range multi-tenant IaaS and PaaS products and services. The company’s main presence is in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, where it enjoys a solid reputation. It can rapidly deploy a Public Cloud environment on a limited infrastructure, giving it a significant competitive advantage which, associated with the depth of OVHcloud’s solutions portfolio, will allow the Group to grow in the Public Cloud market in a more agile and flexible way while having better control of investments.
gridscale’s acquisition responds to three key challenges for OVHcloud:
- The implementation of an ambitious growth strategy in the edge computing market: this model of infrastructure close to users is particularly suitable to use cases requiring low latency, as well as those needing to comply with regulatory requirements in sectors such as healthcare, financial services and government.
- The expansion of on-premises cloud services, by deploying OVHcloud products on customers’ infrastructures. Thus for the most demanding use cases in terms of data residency or local data processing, customers who want to retain ownership of their infrastructure will be able to benefit from cloud-native functionalities, and from the depth of OVHcloud’s portfolio of 80 IaaS and PaaS solutions.
- The acceleration of the Group’s international deployment while maintaining a controlled investment trajectory. OVHcloud thus plans to open many new Public Cloud regions by 2026, in colocation data centres, with limited investments and in line with revenue growth. OVHcloud aims first at opening new regions in major global cities. In addition, in some regions the multi-AZ (Availability Zones) model could be quickly implemented with a limited investment.
The management team, founders of gridscale, and all its employees will shortly be joining OVHcloud workforce, and the pooling of skills and products will make it possible to quickly offer customers an edge computing capacity fully integrated into OVHcloud products. This new offering will be consumable thanks to existing APIs and will guarantee a homogeneous user experience for customers.
The transaction is expected to close at the beginning of the 2024 fiscal year and will have no impact on the 2023 fiscal year.
Michel Paulin, CEO of OVHcloud, said: “We are impressed by the solutions developed by the gridscale teams, which we will be delighted to integrate into OVHcloud. Our solutions and know-how are highly compatible and very complementary. The combination of our different technologies will allow us to accelerate our deployment of edge computing solutions and our geographic expansion while optimizing our capital allocation.”
Henrik Hasenkamp, founder, and CEO of gridscale, said: “Joining OVHcloud is a great opportunity for gridscale. Their know-how and global footprint will enable us to deploy and enrich our products, at scale, quickly and in accordance with our shared values. We look forward, along with the entire team, to getting to work with the OVHcloud teams and our ambitions are reinforced thanks to this trajectory now in common.”
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