Speaking with TFiR, Dirk Alshuth of emma explained how the company anticipated multi-cloud networking requirements and sovereignty mandates before they became enterprise priorities, and outlined emma’s roadmap for expanding sovereign cloud integrations, AI operations, and US market expansion.

What is emma working on?

Alshuth outlined three priorities for emma’s roadmap: expanding sovereign cloud provider integrations across Europe, building AI operations capabilities beyond compute provisioning, and extending GDPR-compliant infrastructure to US customers navigating state-level data residency laws.

Dirk Alshuth: “What I’m working on is broadening the spectrum around sovereignty. There are more countries and more providers, so we need to look into what makes sense to a European audience and a local audience. Secondly, how do we help customers realize the benefits of AI—provide them with the compute they need, as well as the capabilities to optimize and manage it, including the entire operational ecosystem around it? And then there’s the US. We’re looking at how we can work with US customers, helping them scale AI, and how we can use our European basis with regards to GDPR, data residency, and sovereignty to address the needs of US customers when it comes to state laws and other regulations.”

Broader context

Alshuth positioned emma as solving problems enterprises don’t yet recognize. He traced the evolution of multi-cloud infrastructure from merger-driven accidents to strategic architecture decisions, and sovereignty requirements from niche concerns to boardroom mandates. emma’s private multi-cloud networking backbone predates AWS and Google’s cross-cloud interconnectivity announcements at re:Invent 2025.

Dirk Alshuth: “We help them solve the problems they may not be aware they will have in the future. When you look back at when we started, multi-cloud was more of an accident. It was driven by mergers and acquisitions, and today it’s strategic. Nobody talked about sovereignty in Europe a year ago. It was probably already being discussed to some extent, but today it is a boardroom topic. Last year at re:Invent, Amazon Web Services and Google announced the interconnectivity. We already have our own private multi-cloud networking backbone that has been doing this for a while. emma can help you overcome the challenges of the future today.”

Getting started with emma follows two paths based on user expertise. Self-service deployment is available through emma’s website for teams that already understand their infrastructure requirements. The platform supports both no-code workflows for non-technical users and Terraform integration for platform engineering teams.

Dirk Alshuth: “Get started with self-service—go to the website, sign up, try the demo, or get a demo with our sales team. It’s quite easy. emma is, in principle, made for two audiences: a no-code experience for non-engineers, and integration with Terraform and other tech they love to use for engineers. So both sides can start working today.”

emma’s dual-audience design reflects the reality of enterprise cloud operations. Platform engineering teams require infrastructure-as-code tooling and API-driven workflows. Business users and non-technical stakeholders need visual interfaces and no-code deployment capabilities. emma consolidates both under a single platform rather than forcing organizations to maintain separate toolchains.

Watch the full TFiR interview with Dirk Alshuth here.