If you have been following our European cloudscape research you will know we provide snapshots of the local SaaS, PaaS and IaaS provider landscape in selected European countries. So far we have covered more than 1000 local XaaS offerings in Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and the UK. 25% of those 1000 entries are IaaS providers. While most of these IaaS providers are relatively small or belong to larger IT and Telecoms conglomerates, some have managed to build market leading independent cloud & hosting businesses in their home country or even in Europe and across the globe. Below are a couple of examples of leading independent local cloud and hosting providers from Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Belgium and Sweden.
Germany: United Internet
United Internet provides network access and cloud & hosting services in Germany and Europe. It owns well know cloud & hosting brands such as 1&1, Arsys (Spain), and Fasthosts (UK). Recently it bought Polish home.pl for 135M Euros and it is considering an IPO of its Business Applications unit under which cloud and hosting services fall. Last year the Business Application unit had revenues of €930 million. United Internet says it is managing 70,000 physical servers across 7 data centres.
France: OVH
Since it was founded in 1999, OVH has become one of France’s largest ISPs, offering hosting, cloud, domains, and other digital business solutions. The new CEO wants to quadruple its revenues to €1 billion over the next five years. OVH says it is managing 200,000 physical servers across 17 data centres and wants to expand across Europe and North America (Canada).
Italy: Aruba
Aruba was founded in 1994 and offers hosting, domains, e-security, cloud and data centre services. Aruba is active in Italy, France, UK, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. Aruba says it is managing 20,000 physical servers across 5 data centres.
Norway: Basefarm
Basefarm was founded in 2000 and currently has subsidiaries in Sweden and The Netherlands. Basefarm says it is hosting more than 35,000 services reaching over 40 million end-users in 23 countries.
Netherlands: Ocom/Leaseweb
Founded in 1997, privately held Ocom provides IaaS, datacenter services, connectivity, and modular datacenter build, design and manage services. Ocom is the parent company of Leaseweb, EvoSwitch, FiberRing and DataXenter. Leaseweb operates a global IP network across 57 PoPs and 36 Internet Exchanges with a 5.0 Tbps capacity from 9 data centres.
Denmark: One.com
One.com was established in 2002 in Denmark and offers domain names and web hosting services. One.com claims more than 1,000,000 customers in 149 countries. One.com has subsidiaries in Denmark and Dubai and sales offices in Germany, the United Kingdom and Holland.
Developers, engineers and support teams are based in Dubai, India and Denmark.
UK: UK2 Group
The UK2 Group was founded as UK2.net in 1998 and offers domain names, cloud & hosting and content delivery network services. UK2 have offices in London and Utah and claim to have a million customers worldwide.
Belgium: Intelligent Group
Founded in 1999 as Combell, Intelligent is a holding structure which owns hosting brands Combell, Unitt and Easyhost among others. It offers domain names, email and shared hosting, managed servers, fax services, online backup and team collaboration products. The Intelligent Group is mainly active in the Benelux countries and claims to have more than 60,000 customers and manage over 3500 physical servers.
Sweden: Bahnhof
Bahnhof was founded in 1994 and provides cloud, colocation and managed services under the guarantee trademark “Based in Sweden” certifying that the essential core of the service is delivered only from physical infrastructure that is located on Swedish territory. The company operates 5 data centres, 3 in Stockholm, and one each in Malmö and Kista.
Consolidation
The cloud & hosting providers mentioned above have grown both organically and trough acquisition. We expect to see continued consolidation in the local and European cloud & hosting sector as we believe acquiring scale through an active merger & acquisition program is one of three options that cloud & hosting providers have to remain relevant in the years to come.
Want to know about more local cloud & hosting heroes? Check out our European cloudscape research.
