Clément Lesaffre 7:12 am, October 15, 2021

French cloud giant OVH goes public on Friday.

With this transaction, the company, valued at 3.5 billion euros, intends to impose itself on a European market currently dominated by Gafam.

But the company must reassure after the giant blackout that affected it this week and the devastating fire in March.

It's a great day for French Tech.

This Friday, OVH goes public.

The company is part of the closed club of French unicorns - these start-ups valued at more than one billion euros.

Based in Roubaix, OVH specializes in IT services and in particular in the servers that host websites.

It is a flagship quite unknown to the general public, which was born more than 20 years ago.

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400,000 servers

Since its creation in 1999, OVH has specialized in hosting websites, with success.

The company now manages 32 data centers in 19 countries, for a total of 400,000 servers.

It has also become the leading European host. 

This success on the European scene owes a lot to the founder of OVH, Octave Klaba.

Born in Poland, he arrived in France with his family at the age of 17 and learned French on the job during his engineering studies.

He's a little computer genius, a hacker, who doesn't like the light on TV sets.

New growth prospects 

With this IPO, OVH intends to ensure its growth in the years to come.

After the operation, the host will be valued around 3.5 billion euros and will raise 350 million euros in the process.

These funds are essential for the company, which only captures 2% of the market share in Europe.

The remaining 98% of the market share is taken over by the cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

This dependence on American players also poses a problem of digital sovereignty.

Today, state health data is hosted at Amazon, so Americans can enter it at any time.

OVH presents itself today as the only credible alternative to the American giants.

To achieve its objectives, however, the company must reassure itself about the solidity of its infrastructures.

On Wednesday, an outage in OVH's infrastructure put many sites offline for a few hours.

In March, the fire in a data center installed in Strasbourg had already damaged the image of OVH.