India among top markets in Asia-Pacific for clients and revenues: OVHcloud

OVHcloud is a French cloud computing company that offers VPS, dedicated servers and other web services. OVH owns the world's largest data center in surface area. They are the largest hosting provider in Europe, and the third largest in the world based on physical servers.

Lionel Legros, GM, Asia Pacific, OVHcloud, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview.

DQ: Please tell us about the commitment of OVHcloud towards India.

Lionel Legros: We have been named as a contender in the last IDC MarketScape, with a ranking in the top 8 global public cloud providers. Being the only European cloud provider in this selection of providers, it shows how we have strongly emerged as a great alternative to Americans and Chinese providers.

Since the acquisition of the VMware vCloud air team back in 2017, there is a strong commitment for the local growth with the development of the competency center, development of a local support team, and the deployment of a first local Point of Presence to come later this year.

For OVHcloud, India is one of the top markets in Asia-Pacific in terms of clients and revenues. We have witnessed a strong momentum since the beginning of the year thanks to the launch of the new range of virtual private server (VPS) or the web hosting and domain names.

Our decision to provide cloud solutions, web hosting, and domain names offerings in India to resellers and partners comes at a time where businesses are looking to accelerate or kickstart their digital presence upon witnessing the digital economy’s massive potential in the current digital-first world.

We invested in India through building R&D competencies, followed by the sales team with the launch of its Partner Program. We further later launched a Support and Competency center to manage the support locally. As the next critical step, OVHcloud is focusing on the deployment of its infrastructure via a first Point of Presence.

A key USP is OVHcloud's ability to provide competitive pricing, owing to its self-established end-to-end value chain, from building servers to delivering services, and hence providing the flexibility and faster route to market. We have registered buoyant demand from existing and new customers with India operations and are committed to remain transparent on where it hosts the customer's data.

DQ: How are local GTM programs adding value to the overall OVHcloud ecosystem?

Lionel Legros: Launched 12 months ago, the Global Partner Program aims at organisations that support their end customers in migrating to OVHcloud solutions, both as resellers and service providers in fields such as integration, facility management, and consulting. They bring their own added value to cloud infrastructure solutions designed and marketed by OVHcloud.

Since the inception of the program, we have registered great success and collaborated with partners of different scale and size to cater to a wide spectrum of projects and use cases. It has onboarded global partners including leading brands such as Accenture and Capgemini, and hosting services and solutions providers such as IBNCloud, Zolute Consulting, Netsol Technologies, and HostNamaste.

We are also committed to supporting the vibrant local Startup ecosystem and with the launch of the OVHcloud Startup Program last September, we have accelerated our support via grant of up to €10,000 for startups and €100,000 for scaleups, personalised support, and visibility opportunities.

We have already received several applications from India-based entrepreneurs and to name a few of the onboarded ones, we have Starlly, Flixstock, and Smarthub.ai.

Smarthub.ai will also be showcasing their solutions during our annual event, the OVHcloud Ecosystem Experience scheduled from 3-5 November 2020.

In Asia-Pacific, most of the applications received for the Startup Program and Partner Program are from India. This highlights that we are able to provide the right answer to the local market. Our goal is to support Indian Startups in their global development and being part of this program will facilitate their expansion into the European and Asian markets.

DQ: What is your focus on growing local talent and support for customers?

Lionel Legros: Despite the challenging situation because of Covid-19, we are committed to the Indian market and have continued to deploy recruitment plans in the Bangalore office. Over the last 6 months, OVHcloud has expanded its Bangalore office, with experts like customer success engineers, cloud engineers and developers.

Reaching now to more than 60 collaborators, our Bangalore office has enough expertise to provide sales and technical support to Indian businesses looking for cloud solutions.

To ensure undisrupted customer growth and refined support, our Bangalore support office has a team with skilled profiles such as agents, engineers, and cloud architects.

Our team is committed to deliver and support to Asia-Pacific-based customers, for the following levels -- Standard, Premium, and Premium for Partners. Business and Enterprise support will also be managed locally through a team of Technical Account Managers, for customers needing advanced SLA and the most technical management,

The Professional Services team also manages migration assessments, pre-sales consultation, and architecture reviews. The cloud architects are also involved in the tech community events like Vmug.

DQ: What are your investments in infrastructure for better performance?

Lionel Legros: We will deploy a local infrastructure later this year, in Mumbai. This PoP (point of presence) will complete a network of 34 PoPs already deployed and aims to reduce the latency between India and Europe and also between India and Singapore, where OVHcloud operates a datacenter since 2017. The infrastructure investment will be instrumental in polishing the customer experience with better performance for local businesses.

The Mumbai PoP will also allow local customers to use the OVHcloud Connect, a solution allowing isolated and secured interconnection between the local business network and OVHcloud datacenters. It opens a new range of use-cases like multi- and hybrid-cloud projects.

A partnership with global interconnection leaders Equinix and Megaport has been recently announced for our EMEA customers and will be proposed later this year in Asia-Pacific.

By partnering with Equinix, the world’s digital infrastructure company, and Megaport, a world leader in cloud connectivity services, clients using OVHcloud solutions will now benefit from global coverage. This includes over 700 points of presence (PoPs) for interconnecting their services with their chosen providers.

These new solutions provide an opportunity for businesses around the world to combine their existing infrastructure with an open, reversible, and interoperable cloud.

DQ: What are your future plans?

Lionel Legros: We will continue to invest in India in the coming time to ensure an undisrupted service outflow and support to our customers.  We are looking to develop strategic partnerships to continue our expansion into the Indian market. We will also follow our recruitment plan to get local experts to manage these partnerships and our Indian infrastructure.

Finally, we will continue to remain committed to the development of the Indian ecosystem with startups and partners, sharing the same values as OVHcloud like transparency, data protection, and reversibility.