The money just keeps rolling in for Snowflake Computing. The San Mateo-based data warehousing provider has announced $450 million (£341m) in additional growth funding to help grow its organisation and explore new strategies.

Snowflake offers a comprehensive and complete data warehouse – in other words, repositories of integrated data from at least one source, usually more – in the cloud, with the capability to upload and analyse data to offer business intelligence capabilities. The company’s secret sauce is in its patented architecture, which offers benefits such as near-linear scale-out.

Funding for this round was led by Sequoia Capital – whose other investments have included Cohesity, Docker and Skyhigh Networks – as well as including participation from Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Aside from Meritech, the remainder were all previous investors.

Among the company’s plans for the funding include growing its sales and engineering teams across the US and globally, as well as expanding its multi-cloud strategy. Snowflake had been available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since its inception – but compatibility with Microsoft Azure was announced back in July. At the time, the company said the move came about because of customer demand – and with the company’s first value being to ‘always put the customer first’, it will be interesting to see how this progresses from here.

This is not Snowflake’s first funding round of the year; as this publication reported in January, the company secured $263 million in growth funding with a pre-money valuation at the time of $1.5 billion. This time round, the company’s valuation is at $3.5bn.

“Learning to be data-driven is an imperative for every organisation today, and a data-driven organisation must be in control of its data,” said Bob Muglia, Snowflake CEO in a statement. “Snowflake is the most powerful data warehouse in the world for analytics solutions. That power delivers the security, control and business answers needed to enable data-driven organisations.

“This is driving spectacular growth for our company, and this latest funding round will provide Snowflake with the resources we need to serve our rapidly growing set of new and existing customers around the world,” added Muglia.

Organisations are recognising the benefits of the cloud and making extensive preparation – but they are still experiencing various problems with implementation, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by IT provider Softchoice, and which polled 250 IT decision makers across North America, found preparation for cloud initiatives was, on the whole, exemplary. 83% of those polled said they assessed existing applications to determine if they were ready for the cloud, 82% modernised their data centres in preparation, while just under three quarters (72%) communicated the business impact of a cloud strategy internally.

Once companies take the plunge however, the issues begin. 57% of those polled admitted they had exceeded their cloud budgets at some point, while more than two in five (43%) said they had trouble in knowing how to create an effective cloud management strategy.

The larger the organisation, the greater the struggle. Almost half (48%) of IT leaders at mid-sized firms strongly believed moving to the cloud had helped them achieve their business goals, a figure which compares unfavourably with enterprises (36%). Only one in three (36%) of all respondents strongly agreed they were confident about their cloud security policies.

The report also provided one of the strongest assertions that the skills gap was alive and well in cloud computing; 96% of those polled said there was a skills gap in their organisations. This is a long-term bone of contention as regular readers of this publication will recognise. A study from F5 Networks and Foresight Factory last month argued the importance of management in this context; with technologies such as containers and APIs, as well as multiple cloud services, coming to the fore, issues will persist.

“The journey to the cloud, no matter the organisation, isn’t without its challenges,” said Craig McQueen, senior director of innovation at Softchoice. “Organisations are doing the necessary prep work, but there are still opportunities to adjust their strategies for long-term success.

“When IT leaders prepare for the unpredictability in cloud costs, and bring in the right outside partners, organisations can become more efficient and effective in the cloud,” McQueen added.

You can find out more about the report here (email required).

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene has told an audience in London of her pride at how quickly the company has become a ‘major enterprise player’ – with artificial intelligence (AI) and security the key differentiators to their value proposition.

Speaking at the latest leg of Google Cloud Next’s world tour, Greene explained the increasing importance of AI to the cloud equation – a topic covered in chapter and verse by this publication in recent times.

“Cloud is becoming just a better way to run your IT, and it’s turning out to almost provide a working structure for how you can effect change in your company,” said Greene. “Data tends to be in silos across your data centres or in lots of different databases – then people move to the cloud and you put it all in one data lake, and all of a sudden everybody in the company can easily ask questions, subject to access controls.

“Then once you have that data you can start running analytics, doing AI, getting to know your customers so much better, making predictions about what they want and training on your own data – and everything changes for the better,” added Greene.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of what Google is doing around pre-packaged AI – in August services were launched around contact centre and talent acquisition. But these industry-focused cloud toolkits don’t stop there. Google is working in the realms of financial services for anti-money laundering and fraud detection, retail for inventory predictions, and healthcare for managing and anonymising records, as well as diagnostics.

This is all AI-flavoured, of course; Greene noted that healthcare was one of the first industries targeted because it is so data-intensive which lent itself so well to building machine learning models. This is interesting when compared with the verdict from analyst firm CCS Insight earlier this month; the company predicted that by 2020 cloud service providers would expand from general purpose AI to business-specific applications. While Google appears to be leading the way in this field right now, expect efforts here to ramp up considerably in the coming 18 months.

Regarding security, Greene put forward a couple of eye-opening statistics. Google filters out 7000 bad URLs per minute, as well as 10 million spam and phishing attacks. Those who read earlier this week around Google+ being shut down after a software breach may raise eyebrows rather than open eyes at the following statement, but Greene emphasised the security side. “Our security is just built into every layer of the system – our assumption is that anything on the network is a risk,” said Greene. “There’s just no more secure setup than taking a Chromebook, adding hardware-based two factor authentication and running it discless with G Suite.”

G Suite – with AI completely infused, as Greene put it – is a key component of the Google Cloud mix. Last year Google revealed that Verizon had rolled out the collaboration tool to more than 150,000 of its employees, while more recently Airbus had gone all-in, with 130,000 employees. Other customers noted here were retailer Carrefour, using both Google Cloud Platform and AI capabilities, long-time partner SAP, and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), who is trusting Google with image APIs for wildlife surveillance.

This comes amidst recent comments from Amir Hermelin, formerly product management lead at Google Cloud, who took to Medium to lament mistakes in taking too long to realise the value of the enterprise market. “Seeing success with Snapchat and the likes, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise space, it was easy to focus away from ‘large orgs,’” wrote Hermelin. “This included insufficient investments in marketing, sales, support, and solutions engineering.”

With this in mind, Greene appears to be doing her best to make up for lost time here.

Picture credit: Google Cloud/Screenshot

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Former Google Cloud product management lead Amir Hermelin has said the company’s two biggest mistakes were spending too much time chasing Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure – and taking too long to realise the value of the enterprise market.

Hermelin, who had been on Google’s cloud team since mid-2012 – in other words, 18 months before Google Compute Engine became generally available – took to Medium to deliver a valedictory post explaining the trends he had seen and what he thought the future would hold.

By all accounts Google today occupies the bronze medal position in the cloud behemoth market, naturally behind AWS and Azure. According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, Google is positioned at #3 overall and in every geography bar Asia Pacific, where it ranks #4 with Alibaba taking second place.

The past year and a half has seen significant efforts from Google in the cloud arena. As this publication noted in March 2017 reporting on Diane Greene’s Next keynote, the new customers announced seemed to represent a step up from what had gone previously. Colgate-Palmolive, eBay and Verizon were all members of the Fortune 500. Previously, Google’s ‘poster child’ for its cloud suites was Snapchat – an interesting company to tell for sure, but without the oomph of the former three.

Hermelin noted both points as key to Google’s first ‘meaningful’ mistake. “We were led by very smart engineering managers that held tenures of 10+ years at Google, so that’s what grew their careers and that’s what they were familiar with,” he wrote. “Seeing success with Snapchat and the likes, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise space, it was easy to focus away from ‘large orgs.’

“This included insufficient investments in marketing, sales, support, and solutions engineering, resulting in the aforementioned being inferior compared to the competitors.”

When it came to those competitors, Hermelin argued it clouded the company’s judgement. Google was particularly ahead of the curve when it came to containers and serverless, and wasted valuable time building features to ape AWS – albeit features their customers had requested.

“Our native internal way of running things – containers – was to take a backseat for a few years, until a small startup by the name of Docker managed to hype up containers enough to make them relevant,” Hermelin wrote. “Google took notice, and the rest is history.

“Another example is App Engine – predating today’s ‘serverless’ hotness by a few years, and arguably a successful business even back then. Neither AWS or Azure had anything like it, but we had to divert too many resources to satisfy customers that were asking for features similar to what our competitors offered at the time,” he added.

In some areas, this may still be the case. Take the launch back in August of Cloud HSM, a managed cloud-hosted hardware security module service which enabled customers to host encryption keys and perform cryptographic operations at level 3 or the FIPS 140-2 standard. This appeared to be a missing feature in Google’s arsenal compared with AWS and Azure. Yet in some areas, such as machine learning, Google aims to forge ahead, launching pre-packaged AI services around contact centre and talent acquisition in the same month.

Hermelin admitted he would ‘crack up’ at thoughts Google was no longer innovative. “The most important field in tech today – machine learning – is led by Google, which is several years ahead of its nearest competition,” he wrote. “In the field of AI/ML, nobody comes close… not in technology and not in the raw numbers of quality engineering talent.”

Regardless, there has been a significant climb from Google Cloud in recent months and years. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said earlier this year the company’s cloud arm was securing ‘larger and more strategic’ deals, defined at $500,000 or more. Among the blue chip customers secured this year were PwC, Spotify, and Apple.

Hermelin did not specify his new destination, aside from calling it a ‘high-risk high-reward opportunity with a company that’s disrupting personal finance.’ You can read his full Medium post here.

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Alibaba Cloud is naturally dominant in the locally-dominated Chinese cloud market – but it's gaining significantly in the rest of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market, according to the latest note from data and analytics firm GlobalData.

APAC cloud services, according to the analyst house, will hit $55.2 billion in 2022 at a CAGR of 27.7%. This will be driven by an 'insatiable' trend of product launches by cloud providers drawing on the next wave of cloud services and technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data analytics, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The company adds that Alibaba is 'a force to be reckoned with'. "Alibaba Cloud is now betting big on some emerging markets such as India, Malaysia and Indonesia while competing with others in developed markets such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Australia," said Siow Meng Soh, technology analyst at GlobalData.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of Alibaba's concerted expansion outside of its home base. In August the company launched no fewer than nine products around cloud architecture, machine learning, IoT and security focused on Asia Pacific, having previously announced a second infrastructure zone in Malaysia.

In June, Synergy Research argued Alibaba was already at second position in public cloud in APAC, behind AWS, which leads in every geography. Across the other geographies Alibaba did not threaten the top five – but its APAC positioning gave it fourth position overall.

The GlobalData analysis also notes the importance of partnerships to help achieve greater global footprint.

"With the ongoing migration of IT to the cloud, telecom providers and IT service providers have developed a cloud practice to help customers migrate their workloads, implement hybrid cloud and manage multi-cloud environments," added Soh. "These providers often partner with top players, particularly AWS and Microsoft Azure, to help customers keen to use the public cloud services.

"Going forward, they need to broaden the list of partners since customers are likely to be using a wider range of cloud services – and Alibaba Cloud should be on the list for consideration."

Photo source: www.alibabagroup.com

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From competitors to friends; big data behemoths Cloudera and Hortonworks are to merge in a $5.2 billion (£3.97bn) deal.

Cloudera, which went for IPO last year, noted Hortonworks, which went public in 2014, as a competing open source player in its filing to the SEC. The companies are often compared in terms of Hadoop deployments – while the software has the potential to crunch huge amounts of data, it is by no means an out-of-the-box solution. Hence where companies such as Cloudera and Hortonworks come in.

Key considerations to the move included, naturally, value to shareholders, as well as planned financial benefits and product convergence. In particular, the two companies said the accelerated market development would fuel innovation in the Internet of Things, hybrid cloud, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence.

There is a reasonable boardroom shuffle; Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly will be chief exec of the newly-formed company, while Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden will join the board of directors. Scott Davidson, chief operating officer at Hortonworks, will become COO at the new company, with Hortonworks chief product officer Arun C. Murthy and Cloudera chief financial officer Jim Frankola doing likewise.

“Our businesses are highly complementary and strategic. By bringing together Hortonworks’ investments in end-to-end data management with Cloudera’s investments in data warehousing and machine learning, we will deliver the industry’s first enterprise data cloud from the edge to AI,” said Reilly in a statement. “This vision will enable our companies to advance our shared commitment to customer success in their pursuit of digital transformation.”

According to a recent study from IDC, revenues for big data and business analytics solutions will hit $260 billion by 2022, with banking, manufacturing and professional services among the industries making the largest investments in the technology.

As the two companies noted, increasing workloads and technological capabilities at the edge, as well as the potential of AI, means getting efficient data processing will be a huge opportunity for businesses going forward. Cloudera and Hortonworks have taken the decision that two heads are better than one in this scenario.

You can take a look at the investor presentation here.

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As technology changes, the roles the key actors play changes with it. The feted Institute of Engineering and Technology hosted analysts from CCS Insight, who gave wide-ranging predictions on the state of the enterprise technology ecosystem – with the biggest cloud players featuring heavily in future trends.

The yearly jamboree has taken on something of a life of its own, with press headlines regularly questioning some of the more outlandish claims the company has made – only for CCS to be more often than not proved right. CEO Shaun Collins, who insisted his opening speech was not just a 'greatest hits' package, went through the reel, including Three making a move for O2 – later ruled out by the European Commission – and Google acquiring Motorola.

This time around, for enterprise heads, there was plenty of focus on both the emerging technologies generating buzzword bingo cards and the largest companies with a strangehold on the ecosystem. These companies are defined by CCS as the 'agenda setters', with eight members in total; from the West, Alphabet, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft; from the East, Alibaba and Tencent; and in a category of its own, SoftBank, considering its continued spending spree on emerging players.

Martin Garner, senior vice president, spent the first half of his session grappling with the catch-all term 'digital transformation'. What does it actually mean? What results are coming from it? It would appear those pushing the term to its utmost don't really know themselves. Garner emailed Microsoft asking for a flavour on what benefits customers were getting. Microsoft's PR team responded a week later saying they had no numbers they could share.

With this in mind, Garner guesstimated. If 10% of companies were involved in digital transformation initiatives, then there would need to be a 10% efficiency gain to make an official dent – something measureable in the economy. The problem is, we're a little way off that.

Enter, stage left, three heroic figures; artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things. As this publication has variously noted, seeing these technologies outside of their silos will unlock various insights. This was therefore the first prediction CCS put out: AI, blockchain and IoT will become highly interdependent technologies by 2021. "The industry tends to talk about it all independently, but we believe this misses the bigger picture," said Geoff Blaber, VP research Americas.

AI will be the core to understanding insights from data and releasing its value, while blockchain will help establish trust and security. But there is another, more unsung hero. "Connectivity is the big piece here," said Blaber," that ensures you can move that data as intelligently and as seamlessly as possible."

Blockchain was a particularly interesting touchpoint. "There is ridiculous, ridiculous levels of hype around blockchain," said Blaber, "but that doesn't mean it doesn't have significant value." Take Walmart and mangoes as an example. Thanks to a China-based partnership announced last December, the retail giant has taken the process of getting all stakeholders aligned – from farm to factory to supplier – down from seven days to just over two seconds.

Cloud and blockchain will certainly combine – in terms of the hypervendors, that is. All major cloud service providers deploy blockchain commercially by the end of 2019, the analyst firm predicted. It's interesting to note here how reticent Amazon Web Services (AWS) was to initially make its move. At last November’s re:Invent many announcements were made – but blockchain was not one of them. The company would only say it was ‘intrigued’ by what its customers would do there. Six months after, AWS launched blockchain network templates.   

Lots of services are being punted out to test the water – but the next 12 months, CCS argued, will see major releases. "Blockchain is essentially relevant to any industry or any transaction that needs to be securely documented," added Blaber.

That was not the most eye-catching potential change however – although it must be noted the upcoming remains only potential. Nick McQuire, VP enterprise at CCS Insight, had the arguably unenviable task of explaining quantum computing; as he put it, one of the most difficult things that humans have ever attempted. Put simply, quantum is a significant improvement on classical computing. It is not so much computing in 0s and 1s, but more 'stateless’, sub-atomic particles existing – albeit very briefly and inconsistently in this context today – in more than one state.

Here's the double-take. Classical computers would take one billion years to break encryptions such as RSA. According to Microsoft, with a product they are looking to put together in 2019, it could be broken in 100 seconds.

"It's no longer in the exclusive realm of crap science fiction films," joked McQuire as a slide of Quantum Leap came up – which he admitted seemed a little harsh on the film. "Quantum is going to being quite a number of significant security concerns into the security ecosystem overall – encryption is going to be strengthened to defend against attacks from quantum computers.

"Those that are interested in cloud are going to differentiate themselves around quantum," McQuire added. "The size of customer workloads is doubling every year as more and more organisatons go to cloud – it's a tremendous strain on the resource that is there, particularly silicon. We think quantum over time is going to solve a lot of this strain."

When it came to artificial intelligence, CCS argued the big cloud vendors would again be a part of the action. By 2020, the company predicted, cloud service providers would expand from general purpose AI to business-specific applications.

Putting products together around voice, chatbots, video, and so forth, McQuire argued, is all well and good – but what do industries really want? Yes, the call centre is where we've seen things happen, but what about predictive maintenance in manufacturing, fraud detection in finance, and demand forecasting and dynamic pricing in retail? The agenda setters will put together pre-built products to address these challenges, he added.

Underpinning the vast majority of this is the concept of trust. The overriding theme of the sessions was around steering the data-driven economy, but of course not all data is created equal as Facebook found out after the Cambridge Analytica scandal – a topic oft-referenced by the analysts.

This formed the basis of another prediction: trust would be the most important source of competition among cloud service providers in 2019. The example given was around Walmart's beef with AWS, covered in chapter and verse by this publication. Earlier this year, to the surprise of not many, the retail giant went all-in with Microsoft.

"The likes of Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, Google and Microsoft recognise the importance of winning customers' trust to set them apart from rivals, prompting a focus on greater transparency, compliance efforts and above all investment in security," the company wrote.

So back to the agenda setters. This is the agenda they should be setting, but may they be usurped? McQuire sounded a cautionary note with his closing analysis – and it is to the East we turn.

China's relationship with Tencent in terms of its citizen services has caused eyebrows to be raised – not least with the bombshell story around 'spy chips' being inserted into Chinese business computers comprehensively dismissed by Apple and Amazon. But the link between technology and government is one to look at. "What we're starting to see from those geographies is very significant long-term planning and billions of investment in the very technologies the agenda setters are competing on," said McQuire.

"In 12 to 18 months, it may not just be the companies themselves disruptive to this community, but governments themselves. It may just mean there is an arms race emerging at a national level."

Do you agree with these CCS Insight predictions? Let us know in the comments.

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For a company which stores hundreds of billions of files, search is vital for Dropbox, both for its customers and internal-facing. As a result, the storage provider has overhauled its search with machine learning capabilities.

The new platform, called Nautilus, had four goals on its launch; delivering top class performance, scalability and reliability, providing intellient document ranking and retrieval, flexibility for customising document-indexing and query-processing pipelines, and wrap it all up in a reliable, secure package.

The architecture is based at a high level on indexing and serving. Indexing, naturally, is a key factor of any search, collecting, parsing, and storing data for retrieval. The serving function uses the index to return results from user queries. This is by no means uncommon, but with the sheer scale involved, more needs to be done. Dropbox generates 'offline' builds of the search index every few days on average, and puts together 'index mutations' that can be applied to both the live index and a persistent document store in almost real-time – to approximately a few seconds.

Where the machine learning element comes in is through search ranking. Compared with Dropbox's retrieval engine, which returns a large set of matching documents 'without worrying too much about how relevant each document is to the user', as the company puts it, ranking aims to predict items the user wants at that moment.

"The ranking engine is powered by a ML model that outputs a score for each document based on a variety of signals," wrote Diwaker Gupta, engineering manager at Dropbox, in a blog post. "Some signals measure the relevance of the document to the query, while others measure the relevance of the document to the user at the current moment in time."

As can be expected with ML, the system can learn as it goes along, while the company is at pains to note that no personally identifiable information – rather, anonymised 'click' data – is used.

"The main advantage of using an ML-based solution for ranking is that we can use a large number of signals, as well as deal with new signals automatically," added Gupta. "For example, you could imagine manually defining an 'importance' for each type of signal we have available to us. This might be doable if you only have a handful of signals, but as you add tens or hundreds or even thousands, this becomes impossible to do in an optimal way.

"This is exactly where ML shines: it can autoamtically learn the right set of 'importance weights' to use for ranking documents, such that the most relevant ones are shown to the user," said Gupta. "For example, by experimentation, we determined that freshness-related signals contribute significantly to more relevant results."

A further blog noted an interesting aspect in Dropbox's traffic – in that it is dominated by writes rather than reads. In other words, files are updated far more frequently than they are searched for. As a result, the company uses an 'exploded' posting list format. "The exploded representation has the main benefit of handling index mutations particularly efficiently," the company wrote.

This is an interesting development when considering other infrastructure overhauls the company has undertaken. Under Dropbox's S-1 filing released when the company went to IPO earlier this year, 'infrastructure optimisation' was mentioned – in particular, spending two and a half years moving away from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its own solution, known as 'Magic Pocket.'

Nautilus replaces Firefly, which was Dropbox's search tool for the previous three years. 

Every industry is moving towards a hybrid cloud world – with retail, advertising and marketing making the biggest push.

That’s the key finding from a new report by container and cloud technology provider Mesosphere. The study, which focused its responses on more than 700 Mesosphere users, found that almost two thirds (64%) of retail and eCommerce respondents polled said they had hybrid environments.

This is considerably more than advertising, marketing and PR (42%) and IT consulting (40%), which came next in the list. The lowest performing industry is education, with only one in five (21%) proffering hybrid.

Not one respondent in the healthcare industry said they had a primarily cloud-based stack; 71% were on-prem and 29% had hybrid. For education, 64% have wholly cloud and only 14% were on-premise. “Healthcare is going straight from on-prem to hybrid and skipping cloud-only altogether. This is likely due to the size of the data and confidentiality requirements,” the report noted. “Education still trails, possibly due to a large footprint in high performance computing infrastructure.”

The figures don’t correlate with company size. 38% of organisations with 10,000 employees or more are hybrid, compared with 35% for 5,001-10,000 and 39% for 1,001 to 5,000.

Container adoption is seeing steady progress. 84% of Mesosphere users are running containers in production today, up significantly from 62% in 2016. Not surprisingly, Kubernetes was top dog among the respondents. On average, users are running three or more frameworks on Mesosphere, with Kubernetes the most popular ahead of big data service Kafka and open source server Jenkins. The vast majority of those polled (97%) said they were using Kubernetes to simplify deployment.

“The growth of Kubernetes usage on Mesosphere clearly echoes its popularity in the market,” the report notes, “and customers are adopting Kubernetes and leveraging the Mesosphere platform for automation and management.”

Writing in a company blog, Dayna Rothman, Mesosphere VP marketing, explained: “Clearly, the main drivers for implementing Kubernetes on Mesosphere are around simplicity, scale, and flexibility. These drivers are especially critical for enterprise organisations and companies who need to operate multiple Kubernetes clusters.”

Multi-cloud has also gone up considerably in the past couple of years. In the 2016 report, 86% of respondents said they were using only one cloud provider, a number which had gone down to 76% this time around.

France is looking to follow in Sweden’s footsteps – by cutting tax rates for data centres’ electricity usage.

As first reported by Datacenter Dynamics, French prime minster Edouard Philippe, speaking at the headquarters of Dassault Systemes, revealed plans to cut TICFE (taxe intérieure sur la consommation finale d'électricité) from €22.5/MWh to €12/MWh.

Philippe told delegates – loosely translated – that the move would make France a more attractive investment proposition taking into account both Brexit and the Cloud Act. The sector is committed to lowering its energy consumption by 15% by 2022, Philippe added.

In 2015, plans were first mooted for Sweden to reduce electricity taxation for its data centres, putting it in line with other industries such as manufacturing. A study from the Swedish government argued for a 97% tax reduction, which was granted a year later after the Swedish parliament pushed through new legislation.

Behind the Internet lies factories, or data centres, that represent very high levels of investment – anything that allows France to become a more attractive market is fantastic news

This appears to be similar for France – but Philippe also noted a disparity between the country and its European brethren in terms of productivity. The prime minister told delegates that between 2012 and 2015, France was the only country in Europe whose ‘robots to employees’ ratio had gone down. Rather than seeing this as a positive for jobs, it was viewed as a wake up call to get France’s digital house in order.

The move was praised by those in the industry. OVH, which is headquartered in France – and frequently scores top marks in Cloud Spectator’s industry reports analysing vendors on the combination of price and performance – said the development was ‘fantastic’.

An OVH spokesperson told CloudTech: “This announcement from the French government shows their understanding of how industrial development is also at stake in digital business. Behind the Internet lies factories, or data centres, that represent very high levels of investment. Anything that allows France to become a more attractive market is fantastic news, as France too has its role to play in the digital transformation.”

Earlier this month, consultancy DataCentrePricing.com noted ‘huge’ variations in European data centre prices. According to their analysis, rack space in Poland is less than a third (€320) of the price per month compared with Switzerland, Ireland and the UK (€1,000).

France remains the third largest data centre country market in Europe, behind the UK and Germany. Philippe noted in his speech there were 192 data centres in the territory.

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