OVHcloud eyes Indian market in APAC expansion

French cloud service provider OVHcloud is stepping up efforts to carve out a bigger slice of Asia-Pacific’s public cloud market following its recent rebranding exercise.

The company currently operates in Australia and Singapore, as well as India, where it will be ramping up investments, according to Lionel Legros, its director for Asia-Pacific.

“We expect to invest more in India over the next few quarters,” Legros said, adding that the company will soon provide local support and bolster its infrastructure to reduce network latency for Indian customers.

Localisation is key for cloud suppliers in the Asia-Pacific region where many are in the initial stages of cloud adoption and tend to be more cost sensitive.

To that, Legros said OVHcloud is transparent in its pricing and will take on the risks of currency fluctuations so that its customers will not be confronted with cloud bill shocks.

“When you work with other cloud operators, sometimes you will need to figure out what your bill will be at the end of the month,” he said. “We try to provide the best price-performance ratio and everything from IPs and networks will be provided.”

Legros said OVHcloud is also counting on its commitment to data privacy to lure businesses to its offerings, particularly those that are planning to enter the European market which has strict data protection rules.

“Our customers get control of the infrastructure, so they know exactly where the data is located, and on which servers and datacentres,” he said, adding that OVHcloud, as an independent cloud supplier, is also not subjected to the Cloud Act in the US and similar laws in China.

Unlike the top three cloud suppliers, OVHcloud is focused on infrastructure services, leaving its partners and other software providers to deliver platform services and applications from its infrastructure. “Our job is really to be a pure player in cloud infrastructure market,” Legros said.

Besides courting cloud-first digital native companies in Asia-Pacific’s fast-growing digital economy, especially in markets such as Indonesia and Vietnam, OVHcloud is working with managed service providers (MSPs) such as Accenture and Capgemini to make inroads into large enterprises.

Through its acquisition of VMware’s vCloud Air business, Legros said OVHcloud has also taken on enterprise customers that are using its service to host their in-house infrastructure and internal applications on a private cloud.

According to IDC, spending on public cloud services and infrastructure in Asia-Pacific was expected to hit $26bn in 2019, an increase of 47.1% over 2018. Cloud infrastructure services will continue to account for the lion’s share of the market in the region, contributing over half of overall cloud spending between 2018 and 2023.