A unicorn in the cloud: Octave Klaba

In a conference room at Les Docks de Paris, the stage is awash with flashing lights as the drum intro kicks off the show. In front of a crowd of smiling fans, OVH founder Octave Klaba shreds a riff from AC/DC’s ‘Riff Raff’ on electric guitar. Beside him, then-OVH CEO Laurent Allard plays on bass, calm as you like – the pair could just as easily be jamming in their garage. Together they are the rock stars of cloud computing, and this is their musical introduction for the 2016 OVH Summit.

As well as offering unique musical treats, the free event allowed OVH customers, partners and providers to voice concerns, ask questions, celebrate accomplishments and strengthen the collaboration. All IT professionals were encouraged to attend the various business and technical workshops to gain insights into an array of complex IT solutions and projects – the mentality behind the event tagline: "Changing the world together". 

Unsurprisingly, Octave has always had an intense curiosity about technology and computer science. This passion saw him found OVH in 1999 at the relatively youthful age of 24. "I have been fascinated by computer technology ever since I was 5 or 6 years old and that is why I couldn’t imagine doing anything else," says Octave.

He went from CEO and CTO, then to CTO and Chairman – appointing Laurent Allard to the front seat in 2015 so he could spend more time focusing on the technology side – and then back to CEO again this year to lead the execution of the company’s technology agenda through the next phase of strategic growth.

Tech enthusiast Octave Klaba

The tech enthusiast was born in Poland in 1975, and by the early-90s he had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, moved to France and studied at the Icam School of Engineering in Lille, training in the art of management within large-scale mature industries. But as is often the case, his career took a turn into entrepreneurialism.

"While at Icam, I spent my nights creating web pages, and when my American hosting space had no more storage left for my data, I immediately booked a flight to the US," he explains.

"There, I learned that creating a custom-built server was quite simple. So once I returned to France, I created OVH with €4,000 that I’d borrowed from my family."

I learned that creating a custom-built server was quite simple. So once I returned to France, I created OVH with €4,000 that I borrowed from my family.

Little by little, his father, mother and brother also joined in the adventure. Together, they grew the business from a fledgling hosting web company to a US$1 billion global company offering public and private cloud platforms, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, plus an array of web hosting and telecommunications services.

OVH is a leading global cloud provider

Currently the only non-American global cloud provider, OVH opened its first data centre in 2001, producing its first server in 2002, and opening its first European subsidiaries in Spain and Poland by 2004. Come 2009 and Octave was following the path of IP telephony, which took him to the cloud computing market. Then in 2011 OVH became an official ISP in France, and Octave set out to build the world’s largest data centre and expand its footprint into North America (Canada). 

OVH has grown rapidly to become a leading provider of dedicated cloud infrastructure; today the company has more than 20 operational data centres around the world, which house around 270,000 machines, as well as being home to 18 million websites and 4 million domain names. 

"We offer a wider range of services, more than our competitors. We are the only ones offering a choice among Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Dedicated Servers, all in a single private network, and with an application programming interface," says Octave.

"This allows large enterprises to transfer their existing infrastructures to our Dedicated Server and Private Cloud infrastructures, without any modification. Then, and only then, can they begin the transformation of their applications using the Public Cloud in a natural way and still with OVH." With this method, Octave says companies can save money that can then be reinvested into the strategic transformation of their IT applications. 

Unicorn status

The company also claims a strong track record in innovation, which Octave says is a result of a prevailing start-up culture and ongoing company growth. OVH has a team of 400 dedicated research and development engineers. "Today we are a business with a global reach, but we wish to conserve a start-up dynamic," he comments.

"We maintain and develop the power of execution of a smaller company, through the development of very collaborative and agile business models. At OVH, we have found a model that allows us to have a growth capacity in the production of new tools and new products, through creating a dynamic of business units. We also progress a lot by iteration."

In 2016 Octave was strumming his way through hits from the Family Jewels album when OVH hit an impressive new milestone.

After raising €250 million from new investors – New York-based private equity firms KKR and TowerBrook – the company’s value hit the US$1 billion-mark, thus earning OVH its ‘unicorn’ status.

"We presented KKR and TowerBrook with a long-term investment plan in new data centres, new geographies, new products and new types of customers. The plan is clear and precise, both in its objectives and its means," says Octave.

"We will not stay profitable by sparing investment, but rather through sound management. Making profitable growth is the basis of our business, and the fact that 2 large investment funds have trusted us is a very reassuring factor for our customers."

Rapid globalisation

With the arrival of these new international investors combined with strong revenue growth, OVH has seen fast globalisation in the past 2 years, going from a European leader to opening new data centres in Australia, Singapore and Poland, as well as kicking off a management team in the US.

"The capital increase from KKR and TowerBrook is allowing us to invest €1.5 billion over the next 4 years, helping us to consolidate our leading position in Europe and become a key global player in the cloud market," says Octave. "We have been scaling our company into new markets, while remaining completely committed to delivering the excellence in security, service and innovation that our longer-term customers expect."

Earlier this year, OVH set up new Asia–Pacific headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, with data centres in Sydney and Singapore as part of its regional expansion, where it will be competing with other infrastructure-as-a-service behemoths like Amazon Web Services, Oracle, EMC and Microsoft Azure.

We have a plan of development to reach a turnover of €1 billion by 2020 and hire more than 1,000 staff over the two next years. We also plan to open new data centres in the US, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

Octave says the company has also been liaising with major telecommunications providers and cloud-application businesses in the region with the hope of establishing local partnerships. 

Its annual turnover for FY2016, which is standing at €320 million, is set to increase over the next 4 years based on the company’s aggressive growth strategy. "We have a plan of development to reach a turnover of €1 billion by 2020 and hire more than 1,000 staff over the 2 next years," Octave says. "We also plan to open new data centres in the US (East and West Coast), the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

Soothing the pain of disruption

Furthermore, by the end of 2017 OVH expects to have grown its stock to include more data centres within APAC, and also across Europe and the US. Much like it has over the past decade, the global enterprise technology landscape is set to shift and change so dramatically that entire industries face the threat of new disruption.

Octave believes OVH is well placed to help organisations soothe the pain of ongoing modifications. "There are a number of trends in IT that will drive major disruptions in the coming years, affecting a wide range of industries," he says. 

"First, artificial intelligence will come to maturity, supported by advances in machine learning, deep learning, and so on. Second, the explosion of data announced several years ago has now begun, with new technologies such as predictive analysis and real-time analytics demanding greater utilisation. Third, IoT [the Internet of Things] is developing in the day-to-day life of enterprises and private individuals. Then finally, robotics should also benefit from these trends which will accelerate its evolution." 

Cutting-edge hardware & hybrid architectures

To face these growing challenges, Octave says businesses need to access a strong computer network to support the capacity of data and new technologies, as well as one that is strong enough to handle the latency requirements of current or older systems and applications. Computer power must also be enhanced to support the exponential growth in analysis and data processing.

Companies and their beleaguered IT teams must manage the growing ubiquity of technology within their businesses as it’s putting new strain on storage and security systems. This can be done via several means: through the dematerialisation and relocation of data centres; the migration of data and applications to the cloud; or by embracing ‘edge computing’ where applications and services are pushed to the logical extremes of a network, thus enabling analytics and knowledge generation to occur at the source of the data.

"We wish to provide solutions to help businesses meet these challenges, while continuing to pave the way in our fields of expertise," adds Octave. "At OVH our culture of innovation and our agility is focused on offering our customers the ability to choose from our cutting-edge hardware (CPU technologies, HPC, specialised servers). We also offer our customers the opportunity to deploy hybrid architectures (a blend of public and private clouds) that are automated and flexible, while guaranteeing optimal security on the whole system." 

Secure, innovative, cost-effective and agile solutions

One of the key points of difference for OVH is its simplified supply chain operations. This is supported by its engineers, who construct their own servers in-house with a little help from leading infrastructure partners. Intel and Samsung provide chip-set, memory and solid state drive (SSD) components, along with additional help on a smaller scale from other giants. "We build and deliver the servers according to customer demand, which streamlines our supply capabilities," says Octave. "We can adjust all of the supply if we see a need for more memory, more SSD, or whatever it may be, and we can adjust to those specifications almost in real time."

OVH then delivers its own servers direct to its data centres for the customer, to be used as a turnkey solution to accommodate new needs as well as existing ones. "Our strategy is to go on developing our industrial capacity of deploying and delivering dedicated infrastructures-as-a-service based on standard technologies (such as Linux, VMware, OpenStack, Microsoft and RedHat) to offer our customers secure, innovative, cost-effective and agile solutions.

Sustainability's not just good for the planet

OVH servers not only come simple and flexible, but Octave emphasises the company’s focus on creating more sustainable data centres that don’t place excess strain on the environment, despite growing rapidly in size and number. "Servers need to be cooled, but we don’t use air cooling, we use water cooling, which is very energy efficient. We also have an outstanding power usage effectiveness (PUE) rate, because our server capacity and design consumes less energy than standard infrastructure. 

"Of course, the bottom line is that it therefore costs far less to provide the service, so it’s not only good for the planet, it’s good for the client too."