In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Jeffrey Gregor, General Manager of OVHcloud, to discuss the role of alternative cloud providers and how they are helping companies moving to the cloud. He goes into detail about their offerings and why companies should consider alternative cloud providers.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• OVHcloud has a long-standing partnership with VMware in Europe and OVHcloud US was the first to offer vSphere as a service on a monthly subscription and they have worked closely with VMware for years to initialize the point system they use for all VMware partners for calculating the cost mode. Gregor discusses how VMware and OVHcloud have worked together as partners over the years.
• OVHcloud sees themselves as the next tier down from the hyperscalers. Gregor explains that they do all the cloud successfully and are a market leader in bare metal cloud, with a hosted private cloud offering based on the VMware stack. Gregor continues to discuss OVHcloud’s other offerings, such as a fully open source, managed Kubernetes offering and their own private cloud.
• Gregor feels that a lack of skills in the market means that companies do not really understand cloud native enough to be able to take advantage of public cloud offerings and services like Kubernetes. For this reason, they have had success with OVHcloud’s bare metal cloud and their hosted private cloud offering. He explains the benefits of these alternatives, such as customers not being locked in and offering predictable prices on all their services.
• Gregor tells us that they are well prepared should an economic downturn occur being vertically integrated and owning and operating their own data centers in Europe, Canada, U.S., and Asia Pacific. He also discusses the cost savings they have from being virtually integrated which enables them to have a competitive performance for price ratio.
• Gregor talks about  the trends in adoption of the cloud he is seeing, remarking that it is easy for startups and SaaS providers to consume public cloud and platform-as-a-service offerings. He discusses why their bare metal and public cloud offerings are helping companies move to the cloud and the resources OVHcloud has to support them.
• OVHcloud offers a broad spectrum of affordable cloud services with great performance. Gregor believes customers should look to alternative cloud providers first, saying that even though there will be some endpoints or workloads more appropriate for a hyperscaler or competitor, their cloud portfolio has a lot to offer to companies.
• Data is driving cloud adoption with huge amounts being generated, particularly with edge devices and IoT devices. Gregor explains that all that data needs to be stored in the cloud for further processing or future access. OVHcloud’s database-as-a-service offering with their platform-as-a-service, along with AI and ML options are a good fit for this process. He discusses their recent acquisitions of OpenIO and ForePaaS and how they will add to their current offerings.

Connect with Jeffrey Gregor (LinkedIn)
Learn more about OVHcloud (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.