Sovereign Cloud: a simple geopolitical opportunity or the construction of a new ecosystem?
Global geopolitical events are naturally leading to a change in thinking about the Cloud market in Europe.
No, we’re not going to go into an article about THE great battle between Europe and certain nations.
Could we also find a balance in PaaS services?
If we envisage a world in which the scales are balanced, Europe needs to develop its ecosystem. I can already see your thoughts turning to local Cloud Providers and European initiatives (what about the Gaia-X project?).
How can we rebuild the cloud ecosystem in Europe?
My vision of this ecosystem will be cosmopolitan:
- Cloud Providers
- SaaS / AI editors
- Evolution of the ESN sector
- Cross-partnerships for the development of uses
- The human being and his indispensable sectorial knowledge
My last point on the human being, is he at odds with the AI era?
The human being is central to the ecosystem that will use AI to develop.
The constitution of this ecosystem must define the future European Cloud as a marketplace of business uses. The approach of the world’s top Cloud players is to provide off-the-shelf services: developed in-house (packaged edition, etc.) or enhanced by third-party solutions available on their marketplace.
European publishers are making their solutions available on the marketplaces of the world’s leading players, and some even see this as a “dependency” (Technical?, Business?, both?).
How could such an ecosystem develop to balance the Cloud?
All the players in this ecosystem need to bring their expertise to bear:
- Knowledge of the business enables new elements of value to be identified
- The experience of ESNs in a market undergoing major transformation enables them to capitalise on their understanding of the business, develop appropriate solutions in the form of technology platforms that can be used off-the-shelf and manage the interconnection with vendor solutions
- Does the future belong to Platform Engineering DevOps solutions?
- Cloud Providers’ ability to facilitate the integration of offerings on their marketplaces
- Could the interface be an AI chatbot?
European companies have every opportunity to implement this new ecosystem.
One point undoubtedly remains to be addressed: the evolution of the partnership model in the current IT ecosystem. Partnerships are between 2 companies; the model needs to evolve towards multimodal partnerships and interaction between several companies (and why not sector-based organisations for a vision of the business context).
- Will Cloud Providers be the barycentre of this ecosystem of partnerships?
It would be a good idea to move towards the conclusion, but isn’t it more interesting to imagine a new starting point?
The assets are there to make the Sovereign Cloud a reality that will carry weight, but everything will depend on:
- Human beings and their willingness to evolve
- The ability of NSEs to transform their business model (investing in enablers of complementary services)
- The ability of software publishers to innovate
- Support from governments: training, financial funds, etc.
- The ability of Cloud Providers to federate
The ultimate aim of this Sovereign Cloud ecosystem will be to increase the number of business solutions available to companies. We can then imagine marketplaces that will be subdivided into specialised marketplaces for each business.
Conclusion
The main gain is to standardise business processes and facilitate the use of AI in these processes.
Will we see the emergence of consortia along the lines of the European Sovereign Cloud?
