Jeffrey Gregor With OVHcloud US

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by on pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Jeffrey Gregor with OVHcloud. Welcome, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:00:42] Oh, hi. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Cloud. How are you serving folks?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:00:51] Yeah, so cloud is a cloud services provider. We are we see ourselves as an alternative in the market relative to the Hyperscalers, who you would know as us, Google, Microsoft, etc.. So we set ourselves apart from them, but also from other lower tier competitors in the market. We’ve been around for a long time, over 22 years in France. The company in the US has been active for about five years and we are currently the fastest growing segment or business unit in the company. Globally we’ve got over 1.6 million customers. We serve those customers in 140 countries. We have 33 data centers around the world, including two here in the US and another one in North America, in Canada, near Montreal. And what we do is we bring secure, trusted, open and sustainable cloud solutions to everyone from individual users and developers to small, medium, large and enterprise customers. And we do that at a fair and predictable price that allows them to really prepare and plan their business for their own growth.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:19] So now how do you separate yourself from the bigger players in terms of do you serve certain niches? Are you a better fit for certain organizations than others?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:02:30] Well, we’ve we’ve in the US specifically, we’ve been very successful since we started about five years ago, offering disaster recovery solutions, especially for customers who are using VMware software on premise. So there’s three main use cases for what we call our private cloud, so they can extend their on premise data centers to have a cloud presence and give them more capacity and more resiliency and perhaps be closer to either their customers or remote offices. We’ve got a strong disaster recovery solution, which is something that not all companies or customers are always thinking about. So we’re always promoting that option. And we’ve been very successful, especially in this crowded market here in the US where we are not that well known yet because we’re somewhat new to the market. So we’re proving our value to customers with that disaster recovery solution. But really we have products for everybody. We are a pure cloud player and we offer all of the different cloud solutions, everything from bare metal cloud to public cloud and platform as a service offerings and the private cloud, which I just spoke about.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:53] So how do you help the CIOs and CTOs out there kind of choose over cloud, over their competitors? What are some of the kind of tools you could give them to champion your cause internally?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:04:11] Yeah. So one one of them is the price predictability and also just the value for price. And we do that in a couple of ways. So we are vertically integrated. We do everything. And like I said, we’re a pure cloud player. So we’re not doing a lot of or we’re not doing any other things like some of the other providers are trying to do. This is our only business and we focused on it exclusively. Like I said, for 22 years, we do everything from building our own servers, starting with bending the sheet metal and putting the servers together with the motherboards and all the components. We build them into racks. We operate our own global data centers. Like I mentioned earlier, we also operate our own global 32 TERABITS per second fiber network. And then we package it, like I said, into these bare metal cloud, private cloud and public cloud offerings to give a wide variety of offers for our customers to use. So with that scale and vertical integration, we pass all those savings on to our customers. Additionally, another big area where we bring savings is we have our own proprietary water cooling technology that we use to cool the servers and components in our data centers. And that is in contrast to regular data centers where they use air conditioning to cool the servers and components. And the water cooling is much more efficient, it’s more ecologically friendly, and it saves a lot of money in power and electricity. And again, that’s something that we can use to pass on cost savings to our customers. Now, what very.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:04] What what about from a standpoint of data security? Is there any differentiator on that side as well?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:06:11] Well, with cloud, we’re very transparent and the customers always know where their data is. They know exactly which servers or which data centers it’s in, and that’s under their control. We don’t take any operations to move or back up their data to somewhere that they’re not aware of. So they’re completely in control of their data. We’ve got great respect for the customer’s data and their personal information. We comply with, of course, all the regulations and GDPR regulations for European customers. But yeah, really the customer is completely in control of their data and that’s a key aspect of the company.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:00] So now how did how did Cloud land in Peachtree Corners? How did that get on your radar when you you know, obviously America is big, so you can land it anywhere. How did you land in Peachtree Corners?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:07:16] Yeah. So we were made aware of Peachtree Corners and their Smart City initiative. And Cloud has always been at the forefront of technology and innovation. And in fact, our founder, Octave Club, you know, one of our slogans over the years has been innovation for Freedom. So we’re always looking to partner with innovative companies and in this case cities and local governments. And the smart city concept that they have going on there is a perfect fit for cloud. So we were able to come in and become a partner with them and the the many other partners that they have at Peachtree Corners, and we’re operating a startup program there. So we’re offering credits in conjunction with their Curiosity Lab, which is sort of an incubator that they have set up there, the city of Peachtree Corners, to allow companies and startups that are doing work in this smart city, technology and Internet of Things to come and get credits to use our cloud services to develop their technology and innovations to go to market.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:31] So now how has the launch in America gone for a client? How has it been?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:08:39] Oh, yeah, it’s been fantastic. Like I said, we’re we’re the fastest growing business unit in the company. And it’s it’s a global company. 22 years in Europe, starting out in France and then expanding throughout France into Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, etc.. They’re they’re a household name of cloud as a household name in France and very well known throughout Europe. We’re also in Asia Pacific. We’ve got some data centers in Sydney and Singapore, and that’s the second biggest growing area for the company of Cloud decided to come to North America in the early 20 tens with an office and a data center outside of Montreal. And from there they began to serve us customers. But we knew to really address the US market, we needed to have a company in the United States and what data centers in the United States. So we have currently an East Coast data center in Vienna, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., and a West Coast data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, outside of Portland. So that’s what we’ve been using to serve customers with US data center needs for the past five years. We’re looking very soon to expand to a central data center in the US, but even the US company is a global company. About a third of our customers are from outside of the US and that’s because we can sell the servers and services in any of the global cloud data centers. And we have this other interesting technology called V Rack that allows customers to connect all these different types of cloud products from bare metal, private cloud or public cloud across a private network. Like I said, we operate our own high speed fiber network, and that allows them in a safe manner and a more efficient manner to transfer their data between data centers and also to run their applications and databases securely without having to connect across the public Internet.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:57] So any advice for other European firms that are thinking of coming into the United States? Any kind of suggestions from a good launch point and a good go to market strategy?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:11:10] Well, that’s a that’s another area that we’ve leveraged with our partnership with Peachtree Corners and the Curiosity Lab. Through them, we’ve been introduced to and have partnerships also with the French American Chamber of Commerce in Atlanta and LA French Tech. And that is part of our strategy to work with them and help to bring French and other European companies who want to do business in the US and who need cloud services to allow them to get the the powerful services that they need for a fair and reasonable price, and also give them that predictable pricing so that they can plan their business, especially as they’re starting out. And maybe to tie something in to your previous question that I haven’t mentioned yet, which is another one of our key differentiators in the market against other competitors, is that our prices are predictable for among other reasons because in. Maybe just a few. There’s just a few exception cases, but we do not charge for ingress or egress bandwidth from our network and to our servers, and especially with the HYPERSCALERS. That’s where people and companies who move to the cloud get that sticker shock. They look at the very low price per hour or per minute for some of the public cloud services. And that’s great. But when you start moving some data around, that’s where you get the sticker shock at the end of the month with a huge bill for the the bandwidth and transit charges.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:59] That’s where you can kind of see you get those kind of surprises that maybe you didn’t anticipate.

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:13:06] Yeah. So it’s not it’s not really predictable. They’ve got a variable build month over month depending on how much traffic they or their customers are using. And we were able to flatten that out for them because it’s all included and they’ve got a very predictable price model to use to run their business.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:28] So what do you need more of? How can we help? Do you need more customers? You need more a brand awareness. You need more talent.

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:13:38] Yeah. I think like like I said earlier, unfortunately, although we are growing and becoming more well known and we actually have great retention and great reviews from our customers. So yes, we’re just trying to do everything that we can to get our name out there and let folks know that there are alternatives to the well known hyper scalar names. And like we’ve been talking about some of the advantages that we have relative to them. We also, like I’ve said, we’re a pure play cloud provider, so we’re not a managed service provider or a system integrator. So we provide the infrastructure and the platforms for the customers. So some customers need additional help to either operate the services that we provide or to get things up and going. So we’re always looking for great partners who are system integrators or managed service providers who can be along the value chain between us and some potential end customers. Now, of course, there’s lots of and customers that we serve directly that have their own I.T. departments or that are software providers or other service providers that can directly consume our cloud services. But yeah, certainly brand awareness and finding some additional partners would be would be a great boost for us.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:14] And you’re looking for them throughout North America, not just in the Atlanta area.

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:15:19] Yeah. Correct. Any. Anywhere. But we know that Atlanta is a big tech hub. And so we think there’s a lot of opportunities there. So that’s another reason that we’re there and partnered with Peachtree Corners. And in fact, there is a bit of a success story already to tie back a few of these things that we’ve been talking about. So we do have a managed service provider, a small company who has a French founder who we’ve been working with since we partnered with Peachtree Corners. So that’s that’s exactly what we’re looking to do, is find these partnerships, find new customers, get our name out there and continue to grow. Because I think we can really help a lot of people and customers on their cloud journey and really give them an alternative to maybe what they perceived were the only options in the market. And I think the other thing too is on the cloud journey, there’s still a lot of companies who have not moved to or taken advantage of the cloud as compared to having to buy their own hardware and operate it on premise. And also some to many companies have moved to some of the bigger providers and not really. Had the success that they hoped from their cloud migration because they weren’t really ready to modify and modernize all their applications. And so many are considering moving back to an on premise solution. But with our bare metal cloud and private cloud, especially operating on that VMware software stack that they’re familiar with, we can still give them the advantages and the promise that the cloud offers, even if they’re not ready to do that complete transformation yet. We offer a good step to get to the cloud in a familiar way.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:21] So if somebody wants to learn more about the cloud or get a hold of you and have a conversation with you or somebody on your team, what’s a website?

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:17:31] Yeah. So it’s us dot over cloud of icloud.com and yeah, you can see all of our products there. There are contact us forms for our sales team. We’ve got a chat feature. You can talk to our sales agents or support agents and yeah, we’d be we’d be very happy to get some inquiries from your listeners in Atlanta and around the country.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:02] All right. Well, Gregor, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Jeffrey Gregor: [00:18:08] Yeah, thanks for having me on. It was great. I hope maybe come back sometime in the future and tell you how this is all panned out for us in Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:15] Sounds good. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see y’all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.