Cloudreach set for European expansion
Tue 8 Apr 2014
Services provider Cloudreach announced at Cloud Expo Europe 2014 that its next big projects encompass its European expansion, pushing customers towards Amazon Web Services (AWS).
To a degree this has already begun as the company established itself in the Netherlands during 2013, and a year later it hopes to set up new offices. The firm also finds the US as an attractive market, but in cloud terms it is further along in its journey and yet Germany and France are behind the UK.
Nevertheless with some technology and infrastructural development, cloud services will become more available to them than they currently are today. Opportunity therefore knocks within these markets. This is perhaps why Cloudreach expects to see a growth rate of 50% in 2014 in terms of an increase in employee numbers and revenue.
The company says it has invested in people in order to gain confidence with itself and with its customers. With this growth there will be an increase in the number of its AWS account managers, but engineers still comment that there is a need to address the shortage of skills that exist in the market. This can slow things down, and so the firm is keen to address this problem. It nevertheless boasts of having some large and well known clients; such as the FT, Kantar and Channel 4.
“We work with a major luxury retailer, helping them to analyse structured and unstructured data to tailor their promotions”, said Daniel Voss, head of sales and marketing at Cloudreach. He has found that data and analytics tend to be about retail, but there are some less glamorous uses for this technology – such as Tesco’s monitoring of thousands of its freezers. They have the ability to report back their condition, whether their doors have been left open or whether they are likely to fail at any point in time. “This is pre-emptive to ensure that Tesco’s freezers always work”, he explained.
He also predicted that the march to the cloud is imminent. Cloudreach is confident that it will happen very soon, and so it is moving its datacentres over to AWS. With regards to e-commerce and disaster recovery he says that more and more organisations are stating that they are satisfied with it. “For example, banks say that they are not the experts and so they are happy for us as experts to run their applications through our datacentres”, he asserted.
Voss further suggested that Cloudreach’s European opportunity is significant. He says the firm plans to move “further into data analytics and we aim to help customers to bring AWS services to the enterprise, to create an interview that you can fire up with a credit card.” He believes that this will help large enterprises to take advantage of what “the little guys have been doing” and to assist them on their journey Cloudreach has developed a service called the Enterprise Framework.
