The cloud company gridscale offers servers in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands
European cloud provider OVHcloud revealed it is in exclusive talks to acquire Cologne-based German cloud services company gridscale. The company said it will use the acquisition to accelerate its edge computing service offering geographically.
gridscale offers a range multi-tenant IaaS and PaaS products and services including virtual servers, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, load balancers and object storage. It also offers a big variety of database types like Postgres, Microsoft SQL, MariaDB, MySQL and Redis as a cache and as a storage.
Particularly suited to edge computing, it also provides managed network file storage servers, that can be helpful to share data between Kubernetes nodes. The company’s main presence is in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and the gridscale’s existing investors including Endeit Capital, EnBW New Ventures and BLSW Seedfonds (managed by EnjoyVenture) will sell their shares as part of the deal.
OVHCloud wants to move quickly to incorporate gridscale’s ability to rapidly deploy a public cloud environment on a limited infrastructure. It gives the company the chance to offer more sovereign services as well. The transaction is expected to close at the beginning of the 2024 fiscal year and will have no impact on the 2023 fiscal year.
“We are impressed by the solutions developed by the gridscale teams, which we will be delighted to integrate into OVHcloud,” said OVHcloud CEO Michel Paulin. “The combination of our different technologies will allow us to accelerate our deployment of edge computing solutions and our geographic expansion while optimizing our capital allocation.”
“Joining OVHcloud is a great opportunity for gridscale. Their know-how and global footprint will enable us to deploy and enrich our products, at scale, quickly and in accordance with our shared values,” said gridscale CEO and founder Henrik Hasenkamp (above).
What OVHcloud wants to do with gridscale
In addition to building its edge computing capabilities, OVHcloud wants to use gridscale to address the expansion of on-premises cloud services. Customers who want to retain ownership of their infrastructure will be able use cloud-native functionalities from OVHcloud’s portfolio of 80 IaaS and PaaS solutions.
OVHcloud is also looking to accelerate its global growth. The European cloud provider currently 450,000 servers within 37 data centres across four continents and it plans to open many new public cloud regions by 2026 – but utilising colocation data centres, with limited investments and in line with revenue growth.
It will target new regions in major global cities but the company believes its multi-AZ (Availability Zones) model could be quickly implemented with a limited investment in a number of regions. Adding gridscale’s team will, OVHcloud believes, help expedite this model.