“I am one of the people who believe that the wealth of the 21st century is given. I want this data to remain in Luxembourg. " At a time when the private cloud is increasingly abandoned in favor of the public cloud, data is flying to the data centers of large suppliers, especially American, "in Dublin, Amsterdam or Berlin", adds the Director-General by Rcarré, Jean-Guy Roche.
Whoever defines himself as the "booster" of an initiative that has been under discussion for 18 months now begins by setting the context. "We were spoiled children in Luxembourg with the arrival of fiber almost everywhere and data centers which were business facilitators for all IT services companies. Compared to our Belgian or French colleagues, we were able, seven or eight years ago, to start selling cloud solutions. The private cloud has developed well in the Luxembourg market. In the other countries, when you have 2 mega bandwidth, you don't know how to do it, when we were 30 or 40 and could have good results. ”
Only the perimeter has changed. What is the point of having your own data center, which must be kept in perfect working order? Businesses have started to turn to outsourced solutions, the so-called public cloud.
Data leakage outside Luxembourg
"There is a new acceleration, that of the arrival of the public cloud, with Amazon and Azure (from Microsoft). They arrive with service catalogs for companies, "said the entrepreneur. "Pretty incredible Things, that we are not ready for yet, and things that we remain competitive with. With Microsoft 365 or Google Mail, they won. For 4 euros, you do nothing else. "
When customers subscribe to it, he says, "we have a data leak from Luxembourg to other countries. But this is no longer with us. And from there that, strategically, the decision-making centers follow the migration of data, there is only one step to take ... IT service providers like ours ask themselves the question: keep my private cloud, and, for requests from the public cloud, be an Amazon or Microsoft broker? Learn their techniques and see what's going on? Or wonder if there is not the opportunity for a market in Luxembourg to have a public cloud solution. There will not be a catalog of services which covers all the needs, we will not be a competitor of a giant - we cannot -, but we are banking on an approach that allows us to be local, to have local support, support in French, or a whole series of things that people like. We can stand out on the issue of services. ”
Eighteen months ago, he asked Luxconnect to examine this possibility. Little by little, this informal group is growing and includes around fifteen interlocutors around the technology to be adopted and the market opportunity.
"Technologically, we have a product called OpenStack, a free software product that meets our expectations," explains Roche. "We hadn't tested it. It works tomorrow, the clutch is to find enough partners who have enough credibility to find the financial volume. It's still the key. If even I had the money, what credibility would I have to do this on my own? There is a process that must be national, even if we did not go to see politics at all. ”
An EIG that must bring the sector together
The clutch, as he says, is to create an economic interest group (EIG). "Lu-Cix has shown all the relevance, in a sector like ours, for people who have different commercial interests, but strategically equivalent interests, to go from being competitors to becoming colleagues", details the general manager of Rcarré.
"Now we have to study the possibility of who is going to be interested in the idea of embarking on this adventure and if we will find enough interest among our partners, Luxembourgers or from the Greater Region. We can have three types of customers, the prescribers, like the Big Four, who have interests, the consumers, who can bring us from the start a volume that allows us to make a profit, and the IT services companies, which will be able to increase their catalogs of 'made in Luxembourg' services. ”
“If all the data go to Dublin or Berlin, what will we fill our data centers within 10 years? A data center does not pay for itself in three years, "he predicts, before estimating the support necessary for the launch of this EIG at 2 million euros and from bank support, provided" to succeed in convincing the sector of the need to do so by the end of the year, otherwise this project will not be carried to its national level. I don't need a cloud. We will use data centers from Luxembourg, LuxConnect, EBRC, those that exist. We are not going to redo the hardware! "
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