Enterprise infrastructure is fracturing into an ungovernable mess. Platform teams are managing VMware estates, Kubernetes clusters, and workloads scattered across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and sovereign European providers like IONOS and OVHcloud. Each environment operates with different tooling, different cost structures, and different compliance regimes. The governance layer doesn’t exist. CFOs are bleeding margin on cloud bills they can’t see end-to-end, and CIOs are drowning in blind spots.

The traditional response—rip-and-replace migration—creates more disruption than value. But leaving brownfield infrastructure ungoverned while layering on greenfield deployments only compounds the fragmentation. What enterprises need is unified governance without migration.

The Guest: Dirk Alshuth, CMO at emma

Key Takeaways

• Brownfield onboarding allows enterprises to govern existing VMware, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud infrastructure without migration or re-provisioning
• Automated discovery with selective resource visibility enables organizations to bring legacy infrastructure under policy control alongside new deployments
• European sovereign cloud integration (IONOS, OVHcloud, hyperscaler sovereign offerings) addresses GDPR and data residency requirements without vendor lock-in
• Multi-cloud networking backbone predates AWS and Google’s 2024 interconnect announcements, providing private connectivity between providers
• GPU provisioning for AI workloads requires professional services-led assessment to match actual needs against requested accelerator capacity

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In a recent TFiR interview, Swapnil Bhartiya spoke with Dirk Alshuth, CMO at emma, about the company’s new brownfield onboarding capability, European sovereign cloud strategy, and how emma’s cloud operations platform addresses multi-cloud fragmentation without forcing migration.

Brownfield Onboarding Without Migration

emma, a Luxembourg-based cloud operations platform founded in 2021, announced brownfield onboarding capabilities at KubeCon Europe 2026. The feature enables enterprises to discover and govern existing infrastructure without migrating workloads or disrupting production environments.

Q: What is emma, and what problem are you solving?

Dirk Alshuth: “emma is a Luxembourgish company founded in 2021, and our focus is really to help companies deal with the complexity of multi-cloud, distributed infrastructure. Today, we’re at KubeCon, where the topic is AI, but we also support existing infrastructure like brownfield environments, as well as new deployments when it comes to sovereignty and different types of operating models. emma is a cloud operations platform, and our focus is very much on distributed infrastructure.”

Alshuth positioned brownfield onboarding as a critical evolution for emma’s platform, which previously focused exclusively on greenfield deployments.

Q: What did you announce at KubeCon today?

Dirk Alshuth: “Today we announced our brownfield onboarding capabilities. emma traditionally served customers who have needs for greenfields, new deployments. But of course, there’s a lot of brownfields out there, and for us that’s an important evolution. From today, we will be able to serve customers that discover their brownfield estate, bring it under governance and visibility into emma without migrating the workloads, and govern it next to what’s coming for them in their evolution.”

Q: How does the brownfield onboarding process work?

Dirk Alshuth: “The process is quite easy. It’s a discovery process. It’s connection of accounts to the emma platform, and it’s an automated discovery process which is not an all-in process, but it’s a selective process. That means that the user, upon discovery, can still decide which resources need to be visible or which resources should not be visible. That’s part of the process. Based on that, the platform does its work, and you will see it appear in the dashboard to govern.”

Multi-Cloud Fragmentation and Governance Challenges

Alshuth identified infrastructure fragmentation as the core pain point driving enterprise adoption of unified cloud operations platforms. Different cloud providers, different tooling ecosystems, and different operational models create blind spots that prevent comprehensive governance.

Q: What are the pain points organizations face managing existing infrastructure across VMware, Kubernetes, and multiple clouds?

Dirk Alshuth: “The challenge is in the fragmentation. What we see today is there are so many different needs a business needs to serve by sourcing new infrastructure, by bringing in new skills for new infrastructure. Different providers, different environments also have different ways of managing it and optimizing it. There are so many tools out there that do one thing at a time, sometimes for a couple of providers, but not for all of them. So that’s the fragmentation which always leaves companies with blind spots in their operations.”

Q: How does emma help customers unify governance without forcing them to migrate or re-provision everything?

Dirk Alshuth: “emma is a centralized process. That means that for an organization or for specific projects, governance is defined. Policies are defined, and whatever happens within those projects, those policies are auto-applied. These are guardrails. These are security groups. There are specific policies also around—talking about sovereignty—the possibility to say, within a specific project, you cannot use specific cloud providers or specific regions. Or based on role-based access control, you can also limit the access to certain projects. All of that is centralized, all of that is managed by administrators.”

European Sovereign Cloud Strategy

Alshuth outlined emma’s approach to sovereign cloud deployments, emphasizing flexibility in choosing infrastructure providers based on data sensitivity and regulatory requirements. emma supports deployment on hyperscaler sovereign offerings, European cloud providers like IONOS and OVHcloud, and on-premises infrastructure under unified governance.

Q: How does distributed infrastructure fit into sovereign cloud, sovereign AI, and sovereign data strategies?

Dirk Alshuth: “There’s different layers of sovereignty, and every company has to choose for themselves what exactly they need in terms of sovereignty. Where emma is helping is basically allowing companies to deploy the infrastructure on providers of their choice. You can perfectly stay with applications in hyperscalers while you have different applications or workloads that must go into more sovereign environments because of the sensitivity of the data. There is the hyperscaler sovereign cloud in Europe, where you have a certain data residency and sovereignty linked to that, or you can work with European cloud providers like IONOS, OVHcloud and others, where you are in a sovereign environment.”

AI Workload Provisioning and GPU Access

Alshuth discussed emma’s approach to GPU provisioning for AI workloads, highlighting the role of professional services in matching customer requests against actual compute requirements. Scarcity in accelerator capacity drives demand for larger GPUs than workloads require, creating inefficiencies emma addresses through consultation.

Q: Is there any play for emma for those dealing with AI workloads or building AI inferencing infrastructure?

Dirk Alshuth: “In emma, we have traditionally provided the services around CPUs and VMs. Now we are also integrating the possibility to provide organizations with the compute power for AI—being able to source and access GPUs from different providers, including our own in Luxembourg at our data center, provisioning them, managing them, optimizing them. And we’re also bringing workflows for inference in future.”

Q: How are you commoditizing GPU access and making it more democratized?

Dirk Alshuth: “Accessibility is the most important word. When you have access to something, you can commoditize it. One of the things we see from many conversations is that the requests we get very often do not match what people really need. It’s larger accelerators requested, but actually the need is for smaller accelerators. So we help also with our professional services to balance that and see what we have in our data center to provide them with, or where we can provide access to other cloud providers.”

Cloud Cost Management and FinOps

Alshuth positioned emma’s cloud cost management capabilities as a differentiator, particularly for European enterprises deploying workloads across hyperscalers, on-premises infrastructure, and European sovereign cloud providers. Unified cost visibility across all environments enables FinOps disciplines that fragmented tooling cannot support.

Q: Can you share some use cases?

Dirk Alshuth: “One specific use case could be organizations with a larger cloud footprint and an engagement with a specific provider want to gain leverage and want to see how they can get more flexibility by spinning up a new provider. The biggest challenge is these are two different providers, different skill sets, and emma is helping them basically to bridge, to start it up. The platform teams will be using emma to deploy already on other providers in a very quick way.”

He continued: “On cloud cost management, we focus on bringing your on-prem, your clouds, your different clouds, even the European sovereign clouds, into that cloud cost management thinking. You will see what you have on-prem, you will see your hyperscalers—which is today nothing very special anymore—but the fact that you can also bring, for European companies very important, the European cloud providers under this cost management scheme is a differentiator.”

Multi-Cloud Networking Backbone

Alshuth noted that emma’s multi-cloud networking backbone predates AWS and Google Cloud’s 2024 announcements on cross-cloud interconnectivity. The private networking layer enables workload communication across cloud providers without traversing public internet.

Q: Why should someone use emma?

Dirk Alshuth: “We help them solve the problems they may not be aware they will have in future. When you look back when we started, multi-cloud was more an accident. It was by merger and acquisition, and today it’s strategic. Nobody talked about sovereignty in Europe a year ago. Today it is a board-level topic. Last year at re:Invent, AWS and Google announced the interconnectivity. We already have our own private multi-cloud networking backbone doing this since a while. emma can help you to overcome the challenges of the future already today.”

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