Yesterday KPN announced CloudNL. CloudNL is a Dutch cloud, located in Dutch datacenters, compliant with Dutch law, assured by KPN and Deloitte. In addition to CloudNL, KPN launched the cloud services aggregation platform Grip. Grip offers a single sign-on, single bill and single supplier contact to a mix of private, public and hybrid cloud services.
CloudNL is not an Amazon elastic cloud competitor, but is targeted at Dutch government, finance, and healthcare customers that are looking to get cloud functionality and are prepared to pay a premium for Dutch assurance and compliance features.
KPN does not give much detail, there is not even a KPN press release or a Dutch website or any other online KPN information on CloudNL at this point.
There is nothing exciting about the cloud services being delivered. The initial services are Exchange, Sharepoint, Lync, the usual suspects, all Microsoft. There is nothing exciting either about the location of the services, all located in Dutch data centers. The real meat of the announcement is in the cloud compliance framework. KPN and Deloitte provide assurance that Dutch compliance laws are being met and guarantee Dutch data location. The real meat in the Grip announcement is in the service aggregation capabilities not in the cloud services themselves.
We believe this is an important move for KPN. Rather than compete directly with Amazon on delivering low-cost and elastic storage and compute services, KPN wants to be the trusted cloud services supplier and single contact for those Dutch customers that are prepared to pay a premium for Dutch assurance and compliance.
For more information on cloud, cloud sourcing, and cloud integration, check out our following blog posts:
Computing Deployment Models And Cloud Traceability
Four Public Cloud Computing Scenarios: Planning For The Cloud
Integration as a Service: The Logic behind SnapLogic
Dutch Enterprise Public Cloud Services Market Size And Forecast
Common Partner KPIs for BPaaS – TCS’s Approach to Multi-Vendor Collaboration
