On the night of March 9th to 10th of this year, many people realized that a data cloud (“cloud”) is not an intangible matter in the sky, but a very down-to-earth business.
A data center of the French cloud provider OVHcloud in Strasbourg burned out completely, a second was partially destroyed.
120,000 data services, including thousands of websites, e-mail accounts and data administrations, were down or intermittent.
The provider OVHcloud - the only European company that can supposedly stand up to powerful American competition in the promising sector - was badly hit.
Christian Schubert
Business correspondent in Paris.
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Two days before the serious fire, OVH founder Octave Klaba announced that he would be listing his company on the stock exchange. For understandable reasons, nothing came of it. But the 46-year-old Frenchman, who was born in Poland and founded OVH a good 20 years ago, is persistent. Today, only six months after the catastrophe, he believes that the market launch of his shares is possible again. The company announced on Monday that it will go public before the end of this year. "You can entrust us with the storage of data without any hesitation," assured Klaba in an online conference with journalists.
The company has shown great "resilience".
On May 4th, all services were available again.
Because OVHcloud manufactures its own servers, the company was able to quickly offer alternatives for data storage.
General director Michel Paulin reported that OVHcloud had lost around 1,000 customers.
Compared to a customer base of 1.6 million, the damage is therefore limited.
An agreement was also reached in 99 percent of the disputes.
“We recently measured our company's awareness and reputation.
We are now back to the level of before the fire or in some cases even better than before, ”says Paulin.
A Gaia-X founder
However, the provider must continue to learn from the accident. In Strasbourg, for example, as in other data centers, there were no systems that draw oxygen from the rooms in the event of a fire. OVHcloud does not want to rely on such devices in the future, but instead is installing more partition walls in the data centers so that a fire cannot spread. All customer data should also be securely stored in a second OVH location, which has not been the case before.
The company plans to invest 100 million euros by 2025 to improve security standards, said CFO Yann Leca. Exact evaluations of the course of the accident and the identification of the cause are still pending; legal proceedings and investigations by the insurance industry are ongoing. At least OVH can now report that the insurers have promised to transfer a sum of 58 million euros by the end of September.
The IPO could value the company at around 4 billion euros, according to some estimates. The company is expected to receive up to 400 million euros; the money will be raised through a capital increase; so it can be spent entirely on internal investments and possibly also on acquisitions. OVHcloud sees itself as the market leader in Europe with its range of products and its number of customers. When it comes to data storage in the so-called private cloud, the French company claims it is number one in continental Europe, ahead of IBM Cloud and number two in all of Europe, including non-EU countries. When it comes to internet services such as hosting websites, OVH claims to be number two in Europe behind provider 1 & 1.
The much larger market is of course the area of the “public cloud”, the turnover of which is estimated at 55 to 60 billion euros. Here OVH is only the fifth largest provider in Europe after Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Google Cloud. This business is primarily concerned with the European Gaia-X initiative, which aims to establish new standards for data security and flexibility on the customer side. With the American cloud providers, customers are often “locked in” in their contracts, according to OVH, one of the Gaia-X founders. Without the option to terminate, they would often have to accept significant price increases. OVH, on the other hand, sees itself as a guarantor of free customer choice and European data sovereignty.
With around 2500 employees, OVHcloud achieved a turnover of 632 million euros in 2020. The operating return on sales, based on an adjusted operating result, was 40 percent last year. OVH wants to expand in Germany and is currently looking for a location for a second data center. The first is in Limburg.