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Join Viktor, a proud nerd and seasoned entrepreneur, whose academic journey at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley sparked a career marked by innovation and foresight. From his college days, Viktor embarked on an entrepreneurial path, beginning with YippieMove, a groundbreaking email migration service, and continuing with a series of bootstrapped ventures.
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Join Viktor, a proud nerd and seasoned entrepreneur, whose academic journey at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley sparked a career marked by innovation and foresight. From his college days, Viktor embarked on an entrepreneurial path, beginning with YippieMove, a groundbreaking email migration service, and continuing with a series of bootstrapped ventures.
Europe's Battle for Tech Sovereignty: Why OpenStack Matters
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28 MAR • 2025
1 hour 12 mins
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In this timely conversation with Johan Christenson, founder of Cleura and board member of OpenInfra (overseeing Kata Containers and OpenStack), we dive into Europe’s growing urgency around digital sovereignty and what it will actually take to build a competitive, homegrown cloud ecosystem. Johan, a long-time advocate for open source infrastructure, pulls back the curtain on why progress has been so slow and where things can shift.
We kick off by looking at Europe’s deep dependence on U.S. cloud providers, and the real-world risks that come with it. From pricing power and data availability to political influence and tech autonomy, Johan explains how this imbalance affects everything from government policy to startup growth.
A major part of our conversation breaks down the key blockers that have kept Europe stuck:
- Procurement systems that favor incumbents over local innovation
- Long-standing vendor lock-in across schools, agencies, and enterprises
- A steady brain drain of top talent to non-European tech companies
- Innovation programs that reward optics over sustainable outcomes
- The sheer complexity of building a scalable, fully independent cloud stack
Johan explains the uphill battle smaller providers face when going up against hyperscalers — not just on price, but on the range and depth of services they offer. He draws a sharp contrast between basic infrastructure and the fully integrated ecosystems that dominate the market.
We explore his experience building on OpenStack, including:
- Why his company committed early to open infrastructure
- Lessons from over a decade of contributing to and operating at scale
- How complexity, resilience, and governance affect platform choices
- Why internal capability-building matters more than plug-and-play simplicity
From there, we expand into bigger-picture ideas: how European vendors could collaborate more effectively, the role of technical standards in shaping markets, and how cloud-native tools like Kubernetes, if used thoughtfully, might help smaller players compete.
The episode wraps with a sharp take on Europe’s regulatory landscape. Johan argues that the problem isn’t a lack of rules, but the lack of enforcement. He walks through how the disconnect between policy ambitions and operational reality slows down even the most well-intentioned builders.
If you’re thinking seriously about digital independence, infrastructure sovereignty, or Europe’s place in the global tech stack, this conversation is both a clear-eyed reality check and a grounded look at where change could come from.
For more on this topic, check out these related articles (in Swedish):
Transcript
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Welcome back to another episode of Nerding out with Viktor.
Today I'm joined by Johan Christenson.
Welcome, Johan.
Thank you very much.
Johan.
You are in the epicenter of this whole new push that we see as of lately with Europe standing up against America when it comes to tech.
And we've known each other for quite a while.
And you've been doing a company called.
Well, used to be called City Networks and now called Cloud Plura.
Is that correct?
That's a correct pronunciation of your.
Yeah, that's right.
Amazing.
So maybe recap for the audience.
What is this whole push that we're seeing from the European cloud space in general?
Well, I think that the push has actually been ongoing for quite some time, but we have not necessarily succeeded quite well with that.
Fair enough.
But of course, with all the things that are going on in the world today, I think that people are waking up to a different world that are actually.
It's a little bit scary sometimes, right?
There's a lot of vulnerability in society.
Our competitiveness is going down and so forth.
So there is a push, I think, for a lot of different things in that sort of call for independence or not necessarily push against anybody, but more to make sure that there's balance in society that, you know, if things really go bad, we actually can do certain things that maybe we're too dependent on a few players to actually do today.
Absolutely.
I mean, yeah, this comes down to like European 70 essentially when it comes to tech.
And if we do look at almost any company in European ecosystem, they're largely built to your point.
You had an article in one of the big Swedish newspapers lately about this dependency, right.
About if these big clouds were to whatever block the European tech sector or economic sector in general, we would be completely doomed.
Right.
So maybe speak a bit more like how you see that and how that's what we do about this really.
Well, I mean, you know, there is.
If you.
If you take that first bullet, right.
There's a vulnerability that we built in over many years.
You know, it's been a culture here in Europe that we buy American, you know, used to be you never been fired for buying IBM, you know, many years ago.
And that's kind of changed over to different companies today.
Yeah.
And that has gone so far today that there are true vulnerabilities.
Some pieces we're building in ourselves.
Like we have apps in Scandinavia that if an app doesn't work, you can't access half of your things and it almost takes down a society.
But then of course, what's maybe more concerning is the underlying infrastructure of those things.
It's kind of like easily put.
You can say Europe needs to be able to build its own railways or its own roads.
We take that for granted.
But for some reason, you know, we're so comfortable, you know, just outsourcing everything else when it comes to it and as we know it today is of course, the foundation for pretty much everything we do.
Whether it's, you know, us doing this thing now or if you build furniture or stuff that you don't associate with it's still a super foundational part.
And then if you don't have that, I think over time we've started to realize that it's not just the vulnerability aspect in the sense that if somebody hits the off switch or something just happens to it, you know, we're super vulnerable as a society.
Many times we talk about, you know, food, for example.
We need to make sure that we can, you know, produce all the food.
But very few people think about the carrots for the carrots actually get to the table.
There's so many processes, supply chains, and it is everywhere in that.
Right.
So you have that aspect of the vulnerability, and that is just immense, I would say.
And today, of course, in our society, you know, a car, you know, can you stop the car?
Can you make the car go fast?
You know, there's so many of these things that come up once societies become more like, or I should say rather that we've had war next to us and we feel more insecure with allies that used to be very reliable, so to speak, and we might have the feeling that they're not so reliable and there's so much of that vulnerability that goes around.
And you can go on and on about that.
But then longer term for us, of course, is the competitiveness, right?
I mean, if you don't.
If you don't have people that actually know the underlying infrastructure and how you build that, but rather just innovate on top of somebody else's innovation, you become completely dependent on that as well.
And of course, you also lose.
You lose, know, that talent that could actually create that underlying, you know, infrastructure, whether it's a road, a railway, or in this case, it, infrastructure, you need those kind of talents for you to be, you know, competitive in the higher layer, so to speak, of it.
So there's various aspects of this that I think we're waking up today that, you know, it's been ongoing.
I think there's been a lot of people that have seen it because you don't build up these kind of dependencies overnight.
Right.
And in addition to those dependencies of the actual services themselves.
You know, in Sweden we used to have monopolies such as TL Vacate, where, you know, you can only use one company to call somebody.
And yeah, I remember back in the late 9, late 80s when I went to the US the very first time, it cost like a buck fifty or euro fifty to call anywhere for a minute.
And then of course that broke down, right.
And we realized that these monopolies are not so good.
At least it's not good for the consumer.
You know, ultimately everybody hates a monopoly until you have one yourself, right.
You might like it.
So there's, you know, those monopolies or legopolies that are being built up are also huge part of a vulnerable society, you know, and I can only imagine if you're von de Lay and so to speak, who is supposed to go in and negotiate with Trump or negotiate with anybody.
When you have that kind of power against you're not in a great position of power to negotiate, right?
So, yeah, I think that's the situation where we're at and I think that's just being exasperated, so to speak, with Trump potentially then doing things now that are unexpected, let's just put it that.
Way, and let's actually deep dive into it a little bit because this is far more like modern cloud is far more than spinning up a VM, right?
Yeah, that's how cloud was in the early 2000s.
You can spin up a VM on any of these clouds, but they were somewhat agnostic, right?
You spun up a VM there, you spun up a VM there like fine.
Today's tech stack is so far more sophisticated than that.
Right.
And I think that's really where it gets difficult.
Like it's not challenged today to spin up VM anywhere on the globe.
That's, that's a relatively trivial problem.
There are, even abstraction can do this, right?
But where it gets difficult is the services that sit on top.
Like, I don't even know how many products are in the AWS service catalog today, but it's in, it's probably in the thousands, right?
And comparing that to any small to mid sized company or a mid sized cloud or a large size cloud in Europe is still like a fraction of the size of any of the big US Companies, right?
So how do you see that kind of shaping?
How can Europe become more competitive when it comes to this world that has kind of climbed up the hierarchy of like abstraction, where the abstraction is so high that we're far beyond the vm.
Even though, of course, under the scene, under the hood, it's actually still a vm, or a lot of it is.
Yeah, that's a, It's a broad question.
Right.
And I think it's the multi million dollar question type of thing to solve.
You know, I used to be naive when the Internet came around, I thought that, wow, this is the coolest thing since sliced bread.
And I thought it would democratize everything.
You know, everybody can do everything.
So it's going to be, you know, you're going to have so many different services and so forth, right?
Now, 20, 30 years later, all of a sudden, I think that some of those things that I believe would democratize things is actually going the other way around.
Once the power is put into one particular, you look at a Facebook, it's difficult to start another one.
You look at these infrastructure services and so forth, and ultimately it's turned the other way around where the power is put into very small groups.
And ultimately once you have that kind of power, it becomes very difficult, I think, for the, I'm a market believer just to have it said.
And I love globalization, I love all of these things.
But I do believe it's very difficult for the market to break that up because not only do you have great services, like you just mentioned, the lobbyism is everywhere.
If you own a dog, you probably have somebody from a big company.
They're saying what the dog collar should be connected to, right?
So there's.
It's just part of every corner of society, so to speak.
Right.
So I think, you know, I used to think that, you know, you made laws, you know, you enforce those laws.
It's apparent that you'll see some of these vulnerabilities or the lack of competitiveness.
I mean, this has been, in my mind, it's been obvious for the last five, six, seven years, and yet it kind of requires a war for us to wake up from that perspective.
Right.
And maybe it would have been okay to continue like that when everybody's friends, you know, and so forth.
But of course, as soon as something happens, you know, we come back to thinking that, you know, we need certain things ourselves.
Now solving that is.
It's a.
It's going to require extraordinary measures.
In my mind, I don't think there's going to be European, you know, you have clua, you have ovh, you have stacked, you have a few players that first off, do good enough, I would say 90% of the companies could run with these companies and actually do everything they need.
I believe there's stats saying that 90% of the revenue from the tech giants is the five basic services.
So it's a lot of talk about the 5, 10%, but really what they're buying are coming back to the things you're talking about.
A server, kubernetes and containers and a few things on top of that, of course, but when you glue it together, it still becomes as attractive as you're saying there.
So in my mind, in all honesty, I think that it requires extraordinary measures for any of these things to change.
And I think it's one thing is the buying aspect from the government.
As a matter of fact, I hate to say it, but the government who were fighting to remove monopolies, they're the greatest monopoly creators at this point.
I mean, I don't know, mention anybody who in government that does not use, you know, Microsoft, for example, right?
So, you know, if that service goes down, at least Sweden stops, You know, the government can't send an email, you know, and that of course, if things really, you know, shit hits the fan, that's a concern, right?
So I actually believe that the buying aspect is a critical aspect, like how you have to actually force certain buying, I think sound buying, right?
You could put requirements into the buying, like so interoperability, we talked about that for so long most of the time.
If you use teams today, nothing against Microsoft or Jitsu or anybody else, why should they not be able to call each other, right?
Like, it all becomes like business to shut everybody out instead of allowing people to actually work together.
I mean, if you send an SMS today, you sit in the UK and I sit in Sweden, you just assume that stuff should work.
I don't care who you use or what phone you're using.
So if you require certain things like interoperability, maybe you do like open source because you want certain control, right?
Maybe if you're under certain laws, like FISA stuff that actually really goes against certain things, I don't know, you might have requirements that in this case the.
That's not okay.
And I think Europe needs toughen up there quite a bit.
And dare to say that because most of the time, look at Gaiax, I don't know, took two months and all of a sudden, you know, the big tech companies were on stage, you know, and there's not enough drive to say we need to do this and we kind of need to focus on it alone.
So I think that there's a bunch of guiding principles that we can use if we, you know, to drive purchasing and, you know, requirements such as, you know, government cannot just choose one provider because that creates that, you know, if you talk to anybody in Europe, like, we have to have this because word only works with word and therefore nothing else works.
Right.
So you use those guiding principles and then the purchasing.
I think it was Bert who said, smart purchasing, you know, where you actually put certain guiding principles in place.
Right.
And, you know, that's one aspect of it.
Another aspect that I think Europe needs to change dramatically is the whole thing the way we had Horizon 2020, billions of euros just being divvied out.
That was just a free for all, for T systems to just pocket all that profit, really.
But it's wrong from everywhere, Victor.
Right.
It's wrong from us, the suppliers, too.
Right.
Because everybody sees free money and there's everybody coming together in groups to say, how do we get this money?
And the key aspect is we don't.
We don't have enough commercialization in there.
Right.
You got to commercialize everything.
So it cannot be paper that goes into a drawer.
Europe produces a lot of those pieces of paper for an awful lot of money, and it doesn't create that value that we're looking for.
I'm not saying everything's bad, but I do think that we need to dare to change our society and how we think about those things.
We kind of conveniently just think that if we put money in there's going to be innovation there.
For instance, I see groups of bureaucrats getting that money because they're the best at filling out forms.
I myself, as a crazy entrepreneur, so to speak, I'm not even sure I have the time or feeling that I want to fill this stuff out.
And I think that maybe those are the peoples that we want to put the money into the hands of these people where they cannot explain what they're going to create, but they're going to create something that we didn't know, but it was something that turned out to be cool.
So it's fundamental cultural changes from government, for example, that need to change.
But the same goes, of course, from a, you know, from a private perspective.
Right.
The suppliers need to do, I think, differently.
I sat with one customer the other day, said, well, I want this in ashtray.
I said, well, okay, but listen, if you put this Norwegian player together with this Swedish player, you have exactly that.
And now you're actually regulatory compliant.
You have certain other aspects, the flexibility that you wanted, all the other business values kind of came in place.
But of course, we as people, we think I have to get this in AWS or I have to get this in Azure.
But we don't put things together.
So I think, like me as a supplier, I need to be much more open to say, how do I work with this German company to make sure that we put something together in a stack that we make it as easy to consume as.
I gotta say, the Americans and Chinese have solved much better than the European and actually the rest of the world when it comes to infrastructure, at least.
Right.
But it's not just infrastructure, it's a lot of IT services.
Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3.
Right.
It's usually Chinese or American in many of those senses.
Right.
So I think that there are steps that I think.
I'm not sure Europeans dare to speak the language that needs to be spoken to be able to make such a dramatic change.
As you mentioned, I had the article about where I had one suggestion where I said, like, listen, I think we need an Airbus project, you know?
Right.
In the 60s, you know, Europe for some reason felt like the dependency to Boeing and the lack of competitiveness that we're going to have.
Can hear the same words echoing again.
Right.
Shit, that's not good for us.
We got to create something.
It took a long time, right.
We're 50 years into this thing now.
But I don't think anybody feels that the Airbus project was a bad thing.
Right.
It feels pretty good to have those airplane parts.
Yeah.
I wonder what the sentiment was at the time.
I'm sorry, I'm wondering what the sentiment was at a time, because that's curious.
I'm curious about that, looking back at it.
Yeah, it was probably a success story, but what was the sentiment at that given time in history?
Usually there's a lot of resistance to that.
Lots of money, government getting together and all that stuff.
Right.
I mean, the largest social program in the world is American.
So Social Security.
Right.
Back in the days when that was created.
Yeah.
A lot of Americans don't like that word even.
Right.
But we didn't like it so much.
Right.
Today I would say that at least most people I know in the us they would not want to remove Social Security today either.
Right.
So many times.
It's extraordinary things.
And there is a lot of resistance because it's new.
I mean, it's a natural.
It's a human thing.
Right.
It's something that you definitely will see with something like that and of course, I mean I posted something on LinkedIn or whatever and people like, oh, everybody just wants to tax money in this case.
I think we just need to look a little bit more open towards, you know, it's okay that somebody makes money.
It's commercial, we need to commercialize it.
We need to do these things right.
But I'm hoping that maybe Europe can actually find its way by having all of these countries coming together.
Because Europe is a.
Not just a fantastic place.
Just said, I love Europe in so many ways and I think most people do because it has a lot to offer, but it's also powerful when we show that we and when we want to and show that power, so to speak.
And I think Erebus was a great example of showing that when we put that together, willpower and some of that money that's actually out there, then we can do great things.
And in this case I think we would have to just accelerate that.
It's not a 30 year thing, but infrastructure is 10, 20, 30 years.
So you got to start now to be ready in 10 or 15 years.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there in what you're saying.
One of the things that I think you spot on with is the tenders.
Right?
But the problem is writing tenders and decoding tenders is science by itself.
And I know, at least from ministry, I've been involved oftentimes you can know who already won the deal by the time you read the tender because they've codified all the stuff that they can only get by the time the tender goes out.
Right.
So that's a big problem.
And you mentioned Word, like, yeah, you put a tender out there like, oh, it needs to be compatible with word.
You already won the deal.
And that's a big problem in I would imagine this space.
But I do think like it is something that could be done on a buying side to a great degree and making sure that there is at least a preference for this.
And I wonder also to your point about revenue from the big cloud vendors, there is an 80:20 rule or something alike or 80:20 rule on the revenue, but it's maybe not the best proxy for what's unlocking the problems for the customer.
Because there might be a small thing, but it might actually unblock a bigger business need even though it's not measured from revenue and spend on the cloud.
That makes sense, right?
Like a Docker registry.
I know that's a bad example, but yeah, it makes your life a lot easier, but it's probably not going to be a big deal in terms of your spend.
Right, no, but I agree.
I mean, that's the beauty of these services, right.
And I think that the US is, you know, better at most things, making it easy to use consumption.
I mean, you can just go to, you know, ui, you know, I find many of those, they've spent more time finding the right path and so forth.
So I agree.
Listen, this is nothing about, you know, that those services are bad.
It's more a matter of catching up.
And just to have it said, I think from a European perspective it's more about balance, right?
Like, I don't think anybody wants to kick anybody out, you know.
Yeah, it's a matter of let's have balance because when there's too much lack of balance, it creates things that's not great for consumers and sometimes even nations.
Right.
And it's kind of not, you know, oxymoron where in the US I find them to have a lot more antitrust type of stuff in the US against their own companies than we do in Europe, you know, and there the government's not even allowed to use public cloud per se because they're set up with different alarm.
Yeah, yeah, but this is interesting, right?
In particular with regards to Microsoft, I would imagine most Swedish governments, for instance, they use the Microsoft stack, I would imagine.
And that has been, I mean if you look at Asia, they started as a second or third tier cloud vendor well 10 years ago, but now have largely caught up and I think they're exceeded Micro Google in span now.
And largely because they came from that angle, everybody was at Microsoft shops and now like, oh, would you like to move this to.
From on prem to our cloud so you can basically like use as a vendor and what does the environment look like today?
Like if you like, because Microsoft, well, Microsoft Stack or the Windows stack is getting so intertwined with the O365 stack, it's like that is surely not looking well, good for the interdependency, so to speak, right?
No, so number one, you're right.
I think if you look from a European perspective anyway, Microsoft kind of owns the enterprise, right, from productivity tools up here.
And today, like you said, Azure has evolved into something that's a powerhouse as well on the bottom layer, so to speak.
So no, I don't think necessarily it's looking good from that perspective.
But again, one can choose to go that route, right?
It's a matter of choice and the choices are out there.
It's just that, you know, they work Differently and so forth.
Right.
And keep in mind that this starts when you start in school, right.
You know, so you know, you would have either Google used to always be Microsoft, right?
So early on in school you start using these tools.
So you're pretty indoctrinated by the time you get your first job.
So I don't think a lot of people see that as a problem.
It's first now that things are wobbling around in the world, we're starting to think, well, what happens if that happens?
Or Wanderlane needs to actually go negotiating with this and like, well this we're not in a good situation because we can't even do this stuff right.
But well, that's not good.
There are options and it's a matter of us to choose to go that route.
And the question is today there's just so much dragging us into that side and again, not a bad side on either side, but that will not allow us to either even spend the time to look at the European providers as they are.
Because you're completely right.
The service is not quite there and not quite as good.
And you just want, but if you.
Look at collaboration tools like Google Drive or, or Office365, like there isn't really, is there really viable open source alternative or non us alternative today?
Because I, I, I haven't seen any.
At least on the productivity side you mean?
No, I mean on like the document sharing like online editor collaboration tool like that.
Like you have the wikis of the world and the various tools like the notions of the world and a bunch of open source like that.
But if you're talking like straight up word processing, a document and spreadsheet management, I don't think there's much out there like Open Office is great or LibreOffice is great, but that's still, you're still shuffling files around.
It's a very different narrative from like working in the web space.
No, I actually don't agree with you there.
I think LibreOffice and all of these are doing, as a matter of fact, I think when it came to sharing or you know, having multiple people working in a document, I think Microsoft was late to the game and I think that was probably because they, you know, they had their set of tools the way they were and probably had to do quite a bit of recoding to be able to get it all the way there.
Clearly Google was there early.
Right.
But I think LibreOffice and a bunch of these open source and there's more than Just them.
Right, that had that since a long time and there's quite a few decent systems out there.
I get it.
If you're 25,000 people and you want all these intricate, this, that, whatever, right.
It is difficult, right, because there's a lot of services around, you might want to manage your mobile devices, you might want to do something else, you know, so all of a sudden they fall off the wagon somewhere.
But as far as doing the regular stuff, whether it's email, you have Icewarp, for example, from the Czech Republic where they have a full suite doing just about everything you expect.
But again they're not looked upon because we don't look outside.
We normally look.
There are plenty of people using them, of course.
Right, but it's hard to break through in these areas where again, if all government buys a certain product, it even becomes better for us in the private sector who many times are touching government agencies to have the same thing.
Because it works, you know.
Yeah, it's an interesting one.
Like it's.
And I mean you are seeing some initial.
I mean, I guess the narrative shifts a little bit.
Like even Google Drive is becoming more of a wiki these days with page less and all those things.
So maybe that will nudge people to be more comfortable with a wiki style document than a traditional document style document, which will then open up to a whole new plethora of new options.
Right?
Yeah.
But also the document situation I think works quite well.
You know, whether it's, you know, spreadsheet type of stuff or actually writing, I think that it kind of works well today.
But I do, I think they complement each other.
I think wiki is great for certain things and I think, you know, document style is great for some things.
And as far as collaboration goes, I think that there's tons of European solutions, there's tons of open source, but again, not necessarily always put together for the easy consumption where it's just like I feel as comfortable.
And again, if I don't know if somebody will change Docx into something different so it doesn't work with me, then maybe that's a bigger worry of mine as a business owner or as a government agency.
Yeah.
And interoperability between open source projects.
There have been quite a few projects out there to try to like I'm blank on the names now because I've seen quite a few over the years.
But like these, like, oh, we write a rap, we've written wrapper on top of these 10 different tools to make them kind of work together, but they're often very fragile, right?
So like if I were the CISO or CTO for a CTO for like a mid size, large size company, I'd be like, when that breaks, who do I call to get that fixed right now?
Because otherwise my company stands still.
Right.
I guess that's the big argument for a managed solution.
I guess over many of these.
No, but I think, you know what coming back to the RFPs and like what kind of requirements you can put, right?
So you have Element who has a protocol, you know, so all chats work together.
So if we just make sure that we set a protocol and let's say you have to use that protocol, then it works with all the other ones that we use, right?
Same thing with extensions.
I think that Europe could be much more of a standard setting.
Listen, this is how the standard is.
You have to follow that one, otherwise you can't sell to us.
Which means I cannot go off making changes.
So I ruin it for everybody else to work with me if I'm the monopoly, right?
There are actually quite easy things like that.
Maybe it sounds easy, but it seems to me that there's again those guiding principles, right?
If you were to put some serious requirements that you are strong enough to adhere to, then very quickly you would make, you know, not only just allowing the field to open up, but you would probably look at these big players to say, okay, they're going to probably follow.
Europe is about 30% of the world market for many of these companies.
You know, I mean, it's a good point, right?
If you make the standards first spec, right?
Where you're like, well, if you're going to document management, this is how the document looks like.
And you could probably base that on existing standards.
But then that definitely makes it easier to create an ecosystem around it because I think that's really.
It needs to start with a standard almost for that ecosystem to spring up.
Right?
And video communication is a good example of that as well.
And some companies make it a business to make changes to those standards or changes to those extensions to make sure it doesn't work right.
Again, coming back to if you use teams, you use jitsi, or use iSwarp or Nextcloud, OpenTalk, whatever you use.
It seems like if I were the government, I would want them to be able to make calls to each other.
You know, we have telephones today and it'd be weird if they didn't work to call, you know, the other operator.
I mean, we do have standards for this already, like a 26826.
No, yeah, I know, exactly.
We do have the standards, but the voip standards.
Yeah.
It doesn't mean a company wants you to be able to pick up the phone.
That's right.
That's right.
And those are the things again, you know, you as a nation can be very good at making sure, you know, because I think most consumers, ideally, they probably think, well, that makes sense.
Why don't we do that?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
All right.
I want to switch gear a bit into the technical nerdiness because you guys have done some really interesting stuff back from when I got to know you, back when you were starting out.
You started doing OpenStack really early on, and I know you guys spent a lot of time on OpenStack.
So maybe we start by unpacking your journey into OpenStack, because obviously that is tying back to what we're talking about with open standards.
That is like the open standard for VMs or managed VMs at scale, I would say.
So maybe we switch gear a bit to OpenStack, how you got into OpenStack, what your experience with OpenStack has been, and then we dive in from there.
All right, well, listen, so I used to be a big buyer of VMs, or big buyers of servers.
This is called back then, because you actually hold servers in back then.
We're talking 2004, 2005, when I was developing some other games and so forth, where there was need for a lot of service.
And then, of course, 2006, you know, AWS started, 2007, the iPhone came along, Right.
Hasn't been that long to the big shift.
Before that, Europe dominated platforms, mobile phones, you know, Symbian, blah, blah.
So in 2008, I had learned that this thing with AWS was cool.
Like you can do VMS like this, right?
So I actually contacted a Canadian company called Anomaly at the time, a few cool guys that were building something similar, so to speak, Right.
And I think they fell for similar things that we all fall for.
Many of us have fallen for where they couldn't quite keep up with innovation.
Right.
So we did cool stuff.
But, you know, somewhere, 201112 kind of realized, shoot, as you said, Asher was starting to pick up Steam.
Wasn't that good in the beginning, just as we said.
But, you know, slowly but surely, there they have the staying power and they relentlessly continue.
And that's where a lot of people, other people fall off the bandwagon, right?
So 2010 OpenStack starts at that point you have three or four different, call it whatever, private cloud type solutions, Cloud Stack being one of them.
Right.
And that was probably keeping on for the longest, so to speak.
And it was kind of like, I don't know how many people are old enough to know, but it's like VHS and Beta Max on the video side, right?
VHS had the momentum, market momentum, but wasn't technically as good as Betamax.
Right.
And I think when we made our decision in like 13 or 1213 to go OpenStack at that point, it was just that choice where Cloud Stack was more like put in the CD, the stuff just worked, right?
And went for OpenStack for other reasons, for good and for bad.
OpenStack is this thing that it's a plethora of things, you can do whatever you want with it and that's a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing, right?
So it becomes more complex.
So but we made that choice and have stayed with us since then and been part of that amazing community which is, you know, again, Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier has been an institution, so to speak, to drive that from start, you know, when BRAC Space and NASA came together to start it, so to speak.
And I would agree with you today, I think it's like the one standing and the one where people now truly are going into.
And I've been fortunate enough to be on the board of the Open Infrastructure foundation for eight years.
So I've been very close to the community and the people running it, which has allowed me to see a few things that it's just quite amazing both with open source, but OpenStack as a whole and our journey.
In 2015, we launched our first cloud and in all honesty, it's not like you know all the details, right?
So we've learned a lot over that time.
And I usually tell people today that when it comes to open source and let's say OpenStack, it's like Open source is not free, it's free to download, right?
But you need to be there to learn or potentially contribute, which we do today to OpenStack.
But I also say that extra time that you invest in your colleagues to become good at something, usually that knowledge is something that drives value within your corporation.
Somehow, somewhere you can choose to go the other way around, put the CD in.
And now I learn how to use somebody else's thing, right?
So, you know, we've had that mentality at our company the whole time where we really want to Drive that home to say, let's learn we are our best Support.
Whether it's OpenStack, I mean if you look at CLUO today, it's built out of, I don't know, 22 maybe open source projects where Linux is of course the largest one.
And just to have that set from an OpenStack perspective, which is very impressive, is, you know, it's the third largest open source project in the world today where, you know, Linux is the first one, Chrome is the second one and then OpenStack is the third one.
And it continues to be very, very active, so to speak.
So that's kind of like a journey.
And today it's like I usually say, like this OpenStack is, it's like UPS.
What can brown do for you?
You know, brown trucks.
You got to get from A to B.
And it just works and continues to evolve today.
AI, whatever you want to run, you can do all of those pieces there.
And of course it's going up and down a little bit.
You know, there was a while there people were calling for the death of Open Sec and today I think at the latest numbers I saw there's an expectation of 30 to 35% growth yearly from where we stand today.
Could have something to do of course with Broadcom doing things and other things happening in the world.
Of course.
I think that is probably something worth mentioning which is probably a massive driver and massive win for Opus in general.
Like, I mean for those who haven't caught up on the news, anybody who's been using a certain name vendor has basically been shifting over and basically seen their bills being tripled or 5x whatever the number is, are clearly looking at alternatives.
And yeah, interject there.
You and I talk about vulnerability in society, right?
Then you think about big things like wars and like oh wow, you know, somebody can pull the plug and all that stuff.
But listen, infrastructure, that is a 20 year play, always.
What if somebody doubles your prices tomorrow on something so fundamental, such as your infrastructure, Will you be able to build your car the same way?
Will you be able to sell it the same way?
Is it worse than tariffs?
The thing is when companies come in and they jolt something that needs stability, to me it's actually equally scary and equally, I would say dangerous for a business model, you know, because you know, cost is a constant that's always going to be there.
Nobody's going to ask for something more expensive tomorrow.
And if you need to double your underlying price overnight, that's usually not a great thing for your Customers.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the whole price shock there, I mean send shockwaves to the entire tech industry and like much of Enterprise ran on VMware, right?
Or still running on VMware.
But is now in serious doubts about what to do Next.
And obviously OpenStack stands as a pretty solid option for all those people looking for options because there aren't that many large, there aren't that many solutions out there.
If you look at the law, run an enterprise grade data center and manage it in a somewhat seamless way, right?
No, I mean there are solutions, right?
You have Proxmox, you have some other things.
But when you say enterprise.
Yeah, I mean OpenStack is so much more than running VMs, right.
I can't even begin to describe it.
It's huge and it has so many aspects of modern way of having a foundation of infrastructure as a code, if you may say.
And on top of that you can of course build whatever you want, whether it's starting with containers and function as a service or whatever you want to put on there for your.
It's your prerogative, so to speak.
Right.
But yeah, it's a little scary, right, because we keep talking about these big things, but ultimately one should also know that when you trust somebody in the underlying layers, you really need to trust them because if you have a long term play, they need to be long term with you.
And that just goes to show how vulnerable a business can be by.
By relying too much of anything.
Yeah, absolutely.
And if you were to get started today with, if you were to set up a shop today with a.
Well, if you were an Enterprise turning from VMware to OpenShift or OpenStack.
Sorry, what does that look like today?
How complex is set up?
I remember we had conversations many years ago, you have basically hired an entire team just to manage OpenStack.
From the Conversation here, it sounds like it's slightly less complex today than it was back then.
But what's the reality of azurescale spinning this up today?
Well, listen, it of course depends on who you are and how heavily you use it and what your requirements are in the sense of for some large enterprise.
It really does make sense to set things up.
Keep in mind, while OpenStack is fantastic and I would recommend it any day of the week, the requirements around us keep going up.
So Clearwater just launched this full scale 3 availability zone compliant cloud, right.
And that becomes even a little bit more complex, right?
Just like, you know, we're all used to having three Availability zones But to build it and to get all of those pieces to work, you know, over different data centers and so forth, it requires quite a bit just to set things up.
You can do that quite easily.
Right.
But if you want that, you know, resilience, you want the regulatory compliance, you want all of the pieces, right.
All of a sudden you need a team to get all of those pieces together.
You know, just choosing the cage you need or the data center you need could be a task.
Right.
But I do think that OpenStack is, you know, the prime choice, I think for anybody in that sense.
And I think it's easy enough for just about anybody to set up today.
Again, depending on those requirements, if you want to go all the way out there, building an Azure is not easy, even though the tools in themselves might be easy to handle by getting it all together with the consumption model and so forth is quite complex.
But, but it's a fantastic piece of software built by hundreds of thousands of people across the world.
And that's of course the cool part about open source where it traverses nations and ideologies and all that stuff to just build good code.
Yeah.
You mentioned Proxmox is a good alternative for small shops and I've been in Proxmox use for many years as well.
And that's a great tool if it's obviously not scaled for enterprise but for your mid to small size business.
Not a bad shout really.
I think it's a good piece of software as well.
The next thing I wanted to cover is kind of related but not which is the whole move away from cloud which is you see this counter, you see it every so often but there was a, I guess dhh, the Danish Ruben Rails, I forgot his actual name, had his big blog post of 37 signals moving back to on Prem and saving millions a year.
I think this is like, this is obviously something that we see every so often with these moves back and forth people saying oh my sky cost.
My.
My cloud costs are skyrocketing.
I need to go on prem.
I think this discussion warrants so many caveats because there are so many details.
Like there's.
I think it's so it's.
It's a bit naive narrative to say it's cheap to run on things on Prem.
Much to your conversation earlier about you need a team to actually run things.
So maybe like how do you see this shift?
Like these cycles you see like everything goes.
Should be on cloud, go to cloud, everything should be on prem.
We've seen this is not the first time.
How do you kind of see how these shaping up and down like these waves coming or what's triggering them really?
Well, I think just like the stock market, right, when we are buy hungry, we buy and we buy a little too far.
And same thing, when it goes down, we sell too far and then we shouldn't have gone that far down.
I think it's similar to cloud.
Right.
I think that the challenge that people have had is that we get so enamored by something and everybody else around me is doing this thing.
I mean, CEO is worried, shit, I'm the only one not in the cloud.
And the thing is, I don't think it's either one.
It's going to be both forever.
It's just that you want to be smart about it, depending on what business you are, you know.
But the key aspect is you're going to use a cloud or you should use it where it drives value for your business.
Throwing in VMS into a cloud might not drive value.
And then my question is, why do you do it?
You know, you talked about the thousands of services.
Yes.
So if you go in and use a particular type of service that drives 10x on something that you could only do 1x yourself, obviously go ahead.
But then you have this base business.
You know, I said it before that most of the clouds, 90% is like, you know, storage, CPUs, RAM and then containers and VMs, you know, that's 90% of their revenue.
How come 90% come from that when the 10% is what we really should use it for?
I'm not saying you don't need a VM here and there to be able to support that as well.
But it's too skewed.
So now we've realized then that, wow, it's quite costly, you know, very smart.
These services, you know, they charge for all kinds of things you didn't know, so to speak.
Right.
So now.
Yeah, and we didn't, maybe we didn't ask that question before and frankly, I don't think we understood it.
I mean, try to figure out if you take a workload today and you're gonna throw it out in aws, I mean, your guess is as good as mine as to what that's gonna cost.
I mean, you could have maybe an idea, but you know, if it becomes very active, it could cost you twice as much.
Right?
Yeah.
So we didn't know.
And I think that too much stuff went out there just for the heck of it.
And again, if you run 100% there and it drives value for business in all the senses.
Then of course, do so now in this case, where we stand in the world today from a European perspective, I talk a lot about, I call it the new hybrid, where ultimately you need a European cloud to drive certain things.
You need maybe an American cloud, maybe you need a Chinese cloud, I don't know.
But most Europeans choose an American cloud.
And that hybrid would also be most likely on prem some form.
Right.
But that allows you to always think about why do I go here when I have these two other choices, do I go to, for example, I'll give you, we all want to do AI today, right?
So you might have a model like say I use llama, so llama comes, I deploy that.
Now I want to do 12 petabyte of after training.
Now do I want to send that to, you know, some countries somewhere when I know the world looks like this, where laws can change tomorrow, Europe can say something tomorrow, maybe not.
Because If I send 12 petabytes of data somewhere or even generate it over there for my training, that could cost me 50 million to bring back.
It could take me three years when I know the world is going to be, you know, maybe not so stable as we wish it was.
Right?
Yeah.
And ultimately that I think then would allow you to have the flexibility that you need to be able to do both sides.
But again, key aspect is what drives value you should do.
And doing an on prem or just in a European cloud where you have some VMs, then maybe price is the value that you want to have, not necessarily infrastructure as a code that's going to allow you to take over the world.
No, I just need a good price stable for this vm and then maybe that's not in Azure or something like that.
Yeah, I mean you're touching on this concept of hybrid cloud.
It's been a buzzword for the last 15 years, if not more.
And it has always been a bit of a pipe dream.
Like all enterprise were like, yeah, vendor agnostic, hybrid cloud, all that stuff.
And particular hybrid cloud in the sense of not just spanning cloud vendors, but spanning like on prem as well.
All the big cloud vendors, they have some type of option for this.
I don't think any of them really work for modern workloads.
Like, speak to me more like how you envision that.
Like short of sending a box and putting it on dc, how do you see that working?
Well.
I think we all have to realize that you have tools like Morpheus, right?
Like where you can actually have one control panel console, call whatever you want and you can kind of sort of do a little bit everywhere, right.
When I look at the real world, our developers, if they want to use Azure, if they want to use Clura, they're going to use the tools that they have in that sense, right.
So from a user's perspective, many times it doesn't work well around, right.
Because we're all using different this or different that.
And then of course from an IT department, I want to manage this, which is very challenging.
Just take governance, right?
How do I deploy governance rules over to different clouds and so forth.
In my mind the best thing is to make sure you have the great connectivity between the clouds.
You can actually do things the way you want to, but you treat them differently.
There are different rule sets, you know, because ultimately the reason why you were to go to a cloud, you probably go in there for a specific reason.
I want this.
And then you want to make sure your developers or whatever it is that they can use that all the way through.
So not hampering them by oh well, it's got to work with this one.
So we're not going to let you use that because then you go, you know, that's not the thing.
It's better for you to have separated, but you can connect them.
You might not be able to move IP addresses between the clouds, right.
But you still connect them properly.
So different applications can communicate and do their thing.
But key is that everybody who works with it can use all those value driving tools and then it becomes make sure that they work great where they stand type of thing.
At least that's been my experience.
To your point that it doesn't just flow like this, everything works beautifully together with everything.
This is not the world we live in.
Yeah, I think, I mean the one thing that kind of has changed that equation a little bit more so than anything of the cloud vendors has been the cloud native stack.
Right now, love it or hate it, Kubernetes has kind of become this de facto stack of running things in the cloud along with containers.
Maybe not for work, maybe not for legacy workloads, but for anything is written.
In the last few years Kubernetes has been kind of the go to stack, right?
Which is a good thing for cloud agnostic ness, I guess because now I could do a deploy to any of the cloud.
I don't really.
Well short of like cloud specific like routing and whatnot, I don't really have to care much about the cloud it's running on right and which is great.
Which is great.
Now we're close to the world where we can actually deploy the same workload to five different clouds.
And some of them might be on prem and some of the different region and different vendors entirely.
And it actually just works.
Right.
If you couple that with stuff that's coming out, like zero trust movement with.
I mean, I'm thinking Istio, where you can actually bridge clouds.
Now you're getting closer to actually doing these things, which is great news for anybody who's not one of the big clouds, because now you can.
It levels the playing field in many ways.
Right.
So I guess how do you see that playing out?
We talk about moving up the abstraction layers before, but that is kind of like the new abstraction layer, I think, as far as I'm aware.
As far as I see it, at least.
No, I think you're right.
I mean, definitely abstract a lot of things underneath.
Right.
But at the same time, Kubernetes has been around for quite some time at this point.
And you know, we have.
Okay, you might get sound from a little guy coming into door here now.
You know, it's been around.
I've seen services that have deployed on all the clouds, but I don't see them taking off.
I do think we all love Kubernetes and containers as a whole for everything that they provide for developers and so forth.
Right.
And organizations in general.
And you do move workloads easier if you do it.
Right.
Keep in mind, a lot of these services, again, are manipulated a little bit.
Right.
A lot of time a cloud takes Kubernetes and then it does something.
We put a layer on top and all of a sudden you don't have exactly native Kubernetes anymore.
Right.
So there's even those challenges as well.
You cannot guarantee that it works exactly the way it did on the other one.
So.
But.
But there are certain services that are coming along, which is deploying across the globe where, you know, it's the same.
I just haven't seen them take off.
So I'm a little concerned that there are other drivers underneath that actually makes this not being as popular as one would think.
Because I do agree with everything you just said.
I just don't see it taking off from that perspective.
Yeah, I think it's probably like you would probably have better data than I would on this, but I would imagine Kubernetes is not where the money lives.
The money comes from in terms of where you stand.
Right.
Because the bulk of the money comes from legacy VMs.
I would imagine where that's where people deploy.
They want to move their on prem to cloud on a one to one basis rather than re engineer it to a great degree I would imagine that's where the bulk of the revenue coming in your door is that's the flow.
It comes.
Right, well first off, let me just say that Containers is the shit, so to speak, right.
So for us and for everybody else, Kubernetes and Containers are there right now Keep in mind Docker has this maybe security challenges.
In Open Infrastructure foundation we have something called KATA Containers where It's like small VMs from a security perspective.
And so for.
Right, I would say 99.8% of all containers live on VMs.
Right.
If you look at the big services like AWS and they live on vms, it's not bare metal type of stuff underneath.
So yeah, of course the VMS are still like a bread and butter, but the driving stuff is above the VM today I'd say at least anything that's developed today.
I don't think you and I would start our next project saying oh, let's set this up on a LAMP stacks single vm.
We're going to say, hey listen, let's use Kubernetes.
We will have self healing.
We can do it over multiple data centers.
We do have some form of abstraction, but maybe it's not directly movable between AWS and Azure we don't know.
But there's so many other aspects that we want to do with.
So I think Containers is definitely the driver and the standard today for your basic development, so to speak.
But most of them live on vm.
So we have something called Gardener, which is an open source project which SAP started here in Europe and Gartner is awesome by the way, in the sense that it does everything for you.
Running Kubernetes is not that easy, so you want to have it fully managed.
And so this open source part allows you to run it in a sweet manner where monitoring health thing, full updating is there, including not just Kubernetes itself.
It actually does the operating system for your workers and all of that stuff.
So it's really something for that.
But again it starts vms to run Kubernetes on top, right.
And it even sends me an email every time I forget to do the full update saying you gotta update now.
So you click this button now it's gonna update for you.
Yeah, and that's another thing that I think a big push at least I've seen and I've been A big adopter of is ephemeral workloads, right?
Like we at Screenly for instance, we run on Ticluster on ephemeral VMs, right?
Because that's from the security perspective it helps so much for like persistent threat acts and it helps so much for patch management.
So I think the longest RVM's we have run, it's like 24 hours, right?
Doing that is extremely difficult from an engineering perspective if you were to do it yourself, right, because that's so much more challenging and obviously you have to rely on kubernetes for balancing your workloads as you refresh your nodes.
But even orchestrating nodes is not a trivial thing.
Is that something that.
Where's your head around that?
Like how have you gotten so far about those regards to those things?
Not much to be honest with you.
While I do quite a bit of stuff, I also don't do it all, so to speak.
So we're not.
I can't comment too much on that in that sense, to be honest with you.
Okay, yeah, but to your previous point about Stack not being agnostic, I think a lot of it comes down to the supporting services around it, right?
S3 compatible storage, that's a standard now.
Ish, been for quite some time, so that's good.
But there are so many other things like load balancing, like you want database services, some redis all those other things around where how do you see that going?
Like do you think like Postgres obviously being a big database that's heavily in trend right now and has been for a while.
How do you see that as managed services?
Because one of the big thing is that you run your kubernetes as your workload, but then you tag in your corresponding cloud, you tag in your database, your memory store, your storage.
S3 is part of OpenStack already I believe.
But the other services, how do you see those shaping up like in the terms of like making that easier?
I mean that's where I think like open source will come in again.
Right?
So you need, and this is where I think the big cloud services are great.
You know, they add certain layers to put things together to make it consumable.
And that is the challenge you're talking about in and around there.
And even your previous question, like how do you actually put that together in a consumable way where nobody has touch anything and then you have the management of it, you have the updating, lifecycle management, all that stuff, you know, I mean I think we can all say that there's no doubt that it will continue in that direction in the sense that you will package more and more of those things together to make it consumable in a way that makes it super easy.
But ultimately that's also one of the bigger challenges.
Like Gartner for example, puts a lot of pieces together, but you can continue that forever.
Right.
Because it continues to grow and continues to be evolving, just like you said.
Maybe you want a different database to put that together too as well.
You know, the next customer wants something different.
So in general, I think it's just going to continue to evolve towards something that we need to package those things in a proper way to make it as consumable as possible.
Yeah, no, but I think that's the power.
Much to your point is the open source side of things having those packaged in a way that it makes easily consumable so that you can make them part of that without having to rely on these lock ins, I guess in a sense.
Right?
Yeah, I would say so.
Good stuff.
So the last thing I wanted to cover is the legal framework.
In Europe in particular, there is a lot of push cra, EU Cyber Resilience act is a big one that going to impact vendors like yourself.
How do you see this shaping up?
And can you, can we turn this into an advantage for European tech by being compliant to these frameworks, which I guess the big guys will kind of be dragging their feet.
Whereas that could be an upside for a lot of vendors that are Europe first vendors or European vendors.
In all honesty, I thought that, you know, like a Swedish company will be the one that could probably provide services the best in Sweden.
Right.
Because sometimes you have to have Swedish citizen Brazilians.
If you were Brazilian citizen in Brazil you can probably work with the police or the military, whatever.
Right.
But to be open with you, there's been so many laws and regulations and so forth.
Right.
That I'm not sure how we enforce them anymore.
I don't see some of those advantages anymore.
I thought that was going to be the case.
Right.
If you really wanted to enforce GDPR for real, well, then I'm not sure anybody's following that to the extent that you'd like.
Right.
And in some cases I find it extremely important, of course, that we have these regulations.
If you go in and look at your bank account, you're hoping that your money is going to be there tomorrow as well.
Right.
So thankfully there are a lot of regulations as in how we have to monitor and make that happen.
And privacy, of course, is something that's even written into the Constitution of Europe.
It's that important.
The US, they're willing to ban TikTok for privacy, which ultimately turns into national security thing.
We have the regulations, but we don't enforce them always.
And frankly, at this point it's become so vague that of course now the EU is starting to think, okay, maybe we have to roll them back.
I personally do not think that the regulatory side of Europe has been the cause for us not innovating.
No, I don't think that's it.
As a matter of fact, to your point, it could have been an advantage for all of us.
Right.
Because ultimately your family, me, my family, we all want privacy.
Of course, we expect you to take care of my data.
It can be used against me very harshly.
And for those people that do end up having it used against them, they're going to be like, I wish they followed the law, you know.
But it hasn't turned out to be that way.
As a matter of fact, you know, unfortunately, it's been because it cost a little bit extra money to do security, rights to do regulatory right to do things.
Right, Right.
Which, you know, and for those that now did not have to actually comply or did not need to worry so much about GDPR because let's say EMU, the DPAs of Europe, they're not really enforcing things.
Right.
Then some people spent a lot of effort to try to really do that.
Right.
And I think kudos to them.
Right.
Because ultimately you shouldn't have to have somebody enforce something like that because whether security or privacy, we all want that.
So you should take care of your customer's data or your children's data if you are in a city or a government agency or something like that.
But we don't see it like that.
It's like everybody understands the law that if you rob a bank, you're in trouble.
Right.
But when it comes to data, it's kind of like, yeah, is there a law?
It's a little bit like Trump.
I'm not sure.
Is Greenland really belonging to Denmark?
I don't know.
It's kind of like that with the regulatory to a large extent, even in those traditional regulatory strongholds like banking, fintech, patient data law with healthcare and government secrecy laws, for example, around Europe, which is very tough, but not sure everybody is following at this point.
So they're going to continue.
But unless we enforce that, I am not sure it's going to make a huge difference one way or the other.
Yeah, I mean, GDPR is a good example Right.
Because I don't think the only thing that the vast majority of people know about GDPR is the annoying cookie banner that we have to click going to every website.
Beyond that, I don't know if there is much actual implications beyond that really for users.
I don't think so.
I mean again, it's been used, I think against the tech giants a few times.
Certain antitrust and certain things there.
Right.
And, but there, even there it's like, you know, slap on the finger.
Now we make the button green instead of red and we continue type thing.
Right.
So it's, yeah, it's not necessarily doing the good that we all, I think, would agree that it should be doing.
Right.
And if it doesn't, then I'm not sure we need it.
But you know, you could also choose to enforce it, you know, but we also have another challenge not to bring that up.
But you know, then you, of course you have Ireland.
Ireland where all the tech giants are.
Right.
So the DPA of Ireland has been protecting those because they're giving the taxes away.
Right.
So all the American companies come there.
The sad part is that Europe then cannot come together on this DPA thing even.
Right.
So they are protecting, you know, making sure that all the European data can go out.
They will never prosecute the U.S.
companies because they are the ones feeding Ireland.
There's a reason why Ireland has the highest GDP per capita and it's not because they have green grass and good beer.
You know, I, I can guarantee you that.
Yeah.
I mean, although they seem to be moving away from Ireland to now, but maybe that's the one reason they will stay.
But they, as far as I'm aware, like most of the big companies have like downsized all their offices there because once those subsidies ran out, there was absolutely no reason to be there anymore.
So.
Agreed.
Right.
So, but again we got to come together.
Right.
So yeah, either we do or we do it all the way through.
And then I think it could become a beneficial thing for a European company.
But as long as it's not done right, then no, it's actually just creating havoc for both sides.
Yeah.
From a game theoretical perspective, it creates a really strange incentive structure.
Right.
Because if you know that you're not going to be prosecuted for not following these, then you absolutely have no reason, theoretically you have no reason to do it in the first place.
Right.
Well, again, the reason is of course this.
If I have a customer's data, I want to treat it right.
That should be in everybody's Heart.
Right.
But unfortunately that's not how businesses think.
They think like, okay, if I don't have to do it, if I can save money, I'm going to go the short route.
Yeah.
And obviously with 23 and me folding this week, obviously that's a big one in terms of data privacy, obviously unrelated to this.
But just thought about that when you mentioned that, right.
There are things happening, right.
I think to your point, it's going to be interesting to see in the world that we live in, you know, what will we in Europe do?
Are we going to fold what we think is important, to think that we're going to catch up or are we going to find other ways to do so?
And again, I don't think that the regulatory has to be.
We probably can change a number of things, don't get me wrong because it's probably been overdone.
But a lot of the things I see, for example in Nissan, the security, right, Talking about the vulnerability, we came back to the vulnerability, you know, it's great that pushes on, right?
Because a lot of us businesses, we don't do the security all the way through because.
But as soon as something happens, everybody's on the problem, right?
So we kind of need somebody to kick us in the butt a little bit to say, hey listen, let's do it before it happens, you know, and.
That'S security is one of those things.
Like you, it's very difficult to justify security, much to your point, until something happens because it's usually the first line item that gets slashed in a lot of companies budget because it's preventative.
Doing life cycle management, right?
Doing patch management, right.
Doing ongoing management and audits of all these things.
Not a trivial thing, not revenue generating, that's for sure.
So when this is why I'm slightly hopeful that CRA will actually have teeth because there's a lot of good stuff in there, right?
Like doing sboms properly, for instance, which is key to actually doing secure supply chain now.
But again, unless there are any teeth, it will just be another thing that doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
And that's the whole point, right?
So I do think that security is a good thing that we've been pushed towards that, you know.
But then the big question, I know we're getting to the, towards the end here, I'll throw this in.
So we had this thing about vulnerability, then we had this thing about competitiveness, right?
And I think we're starting to see that it's getting tougher for us to stand up against Anybody, because you know, you have weaker and weaker negotiating power everywhere.
Not just wonder Lane, but also our companies and so forth.
Because we need somebody.
Right?
Yeah.
But what's even more concerning, if one takes a little more philosophical philosophy type of level, is democracy.
Right?
Yeah.
You know, where we're ultimately we talk about the laws you mentioned.
Now take GDPR as maybe a bad example, but for us to be able to create a law like that in the future, we would have to go to all these other countries and please do not take our data and please don't create your laws that allows you to take those data or that data.
Otherwise we cannot create those laws.
And our whole foundation of our society are the laws.
Right.
So it's an interesting way that the world is, and this is not just Europe, US and China.
This is like the world, you know, the more intertwined we are, the more dependent you are.
The question is, will those kind of things start popping up as well?
Where.
No, listen, we have FISA here and we're going to use it.
And then the question is, okay, can we have any digital laws or manage data and say this or that, especially when you have certain dependencies.
Right.
I, I'm hoping that we'll find a way to work all nicely together.
Right.
Because ultimately that's what the Internet is about and that's what this lovely world should be about.
Right now we're just going the wrong direction in so many areas.
But ultimately, just so everybody understands, it's not just the competitiveness, because we, Europe is probably going to do well for the next 25 years.
You and I might not see the decline, but democracy, that can change quickly as we've seen in the past.
So one should at least be aware of that.
The things that we're talking about are very significant to us, not just here in Europe, but to everybody.
I think there's another element there to cover, which is the increased demands for backdoors, doors in encryption.
I know this is a much bigger topic, but what we saw just last few weeks, the Apple is going up against the UK government on like saying, hey, no, we're not going to give you access to our cloud storage.
But that's hardly the first time we've seen these debates and they, we only seen the ones that making out in the public.
So it's probably like this is probably like the coal, the canary in the coal mine kind of situation.
But clearly that's another thing because if we don't really trust that, then if there are backdoors in all These things.
Well, there's a lot more at stake there.
Yeah.
So it's a tough digital world for everybody.
Right.
So I don't know, we got to find a way to play nice, you know.
But again, that comes down, back down to the regulatory side as well.
Right.
Backdoors could be the government or somebody else wanting that, you know.
You know, regulatory aspects are usually like defining the playing rules, you know, and you gotta play by the rules.
And of course, in the world we live in, not everybody do play by the rules.
And that's where it kind of gets a little scary.
Right.
So yeah, that's a whole long topic to be talked about.
Right.
But it's kind of cool, like the CEO signal.
No, listen, we'll leave your market if you force us to do something like that.
And that's also notice one little request and the first thing that comes is a threat.
We will leave your market.
Or like Google and Australia, when Australia wanted something, Google finally just said, well, then we'll leave.
And then Australia realized, well, shoot, if they leave, our life will change forever that we don't want.
So there.
These digital things that were so simple for a while ago, they're so complex today and so potentially devastating if somebody pulls the carpet.
Right.
If you, if you wake up tomorrow morning, you think about everything that you go through in your daily life that's so connected in some shape or form, it gets a little bit like, whoa, how would I do that?
How would I do that?
I can't even get money.
How would I get food?
It just becomes really complex really quickly.
And very few of those are from the uk.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, yeah, much your point, like if Google or Microsoft decided to pull the plug on the market, like rippling effect of that would be insane from just a cloud perspective.
Right.
So absolutely, there's, there is an argument for, that's very valid for increased sovereignty around cloud management and cloud in general.
So absolutely.
I, I, I'm, yeah.
Does that work balance?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, it's not either or, it's both.
Right.
And that's what we just need to figure out is how do we make something that works and not another working group on bureaucrats to write papers about how a European cloud can work, but actually companies like yourself doing it together with other cloud vendors.
I think that's the real solution.
Yeah, it's got to start somewhere.
Right.
So we got a few long years ahead of ourselves, but we gotta choose first that we want to make a change.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Do you want this has been a great pleasure and anything you want to say to the audience before we jump off happy you can do it.
Shout out to your portfolio of companies and whatnot before we jump off.
No but as always I've had a number of years with the open source communities right and there was a big event that came up here with the Open Infrastructure foundation now joining the LF and just want to say it's a super big milestone after almost 15 years here now in developing that and I hope that's going to continue and I hope everybody is listening in.
You know try out open source if you haven't been playing with it do get a chance to contribute and see if it could fit your lifestyle and move parts of your life forward as well.
Good stuff again thanks so much Johan.
Toxic.
Cheers.
Right.
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