Latest on GAIA-X Project: Will It Really Best AWS, Azure, Google?

With the nonprofit GAIA-X Foundation now established, the organizations participating in the European cloud computing project expect to have a variety of use cases ready by the end of the year. So far, more than 40 have been submitted and presented, The GAIA-X project notes on its website. But around the industry, there’s wariness. Some onlookers – cloud analysts and hands-on experts alike – seem to view GAIA-X with skepticism.

“The leading cloud providers have already moved quickly to build up this market,” Gartner analyst Rene Buest told Reuters.

Cloud Security Alliance’s Paul Simmonds

Paul Simmonds, board member for the Cloud Security Alliance’s U.K. chapter, made a similar observation in an online forum.

“The ‘big’ three have already got the corporates sewn up, with prices, marketing, etc.,” he wrote. “All are non-EU.”

Plus, he said, most corporations need a global platform because they operate around the world. Thus, “it’s not just EU regulations they need to conform to.”

But for Yann Lechelle, CEO of Paris-headquartered Scaleway, which sells through the channel, the point may not be large-scale attrition from AWS, Azure and Google — at least, not at first.

Scaleway’s Yann Lechelle

“It is … not unimaginable to think European cloud players are capable of supplying at least a third of European demand. It doesn’t have to be binary,” Lechelle wrote in a June 4 blog. Let’s start by improving the ratio; then we can think about sovereignty. If we are ambitious, there is also no reason why we should not strive to meet a third of demand in America, Africa and Asia.”

To be sure, the GAIA-X project likely will face initial headwinds. Right now, AWS leads among cloud providers in Europe, according to Synergy Research Group. AWS also is the top company in all of the major individual country markets, the analyst firm found. Microsoft ranks second, with Google Cloud coming in third. IBM stands out at fourth in Europe, following by the likes of Salesforce, Rackspace and Oracle. The largest markets by country are the U.K., Germany, France and the Netherlands. France and Germany are key GAIA-X project players. All in all, these numbers mean GAIA-X has its work cut out for it.

“There is no shortage of companies fighting for a share of the market, but across the region as a whole, the top six cloud providers control three quarters of the market — and their share has been increasing,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, recently said. “Given the importance of scale, global presence and deep pockets, it will be difficult for any of the smaller cloud providers to change that picture.”

GAIX-X Project and the Channel Opportunity

Regardless of whether companies adopt GAIA-X en masse, partners will have a unique public cloud option for clients. That could prove fortuitous as organizations keep supporting remote work because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

“With the COVID crisis, companies massively shifted to teleworking,” French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said earlier this month during a video news conference, according to AP. “This makes the need for [a] secure and European cloud solution all the more urgent.”

Other possibilities await highly invested cloud partners such as managed service providers, system integrators and VARs. GAIA-X says such subject-matter experts can expect to benefit “from market transparency, broad access to alternative offers and the resulting opportunities,” as the foundation writes in its FAQs.

Elie Girard, CEO of Atos, a multinational IT services and consulting firm that relies on partners, similarly predicts “the creation of value-added ecosystems.”

What is the GAIA-X Project?

GAIA-X officially launched early this month. The project itself has been under discussion and in creation mode since 2019. The initiative seeks to …

… free European public cloud users from dependence on external cloud providers — namely, U.S.-based Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, as well as China’s Alibaba Cloud. GAIA-X will include the ability for organizations to easily switch among cloud providers, thanks in part to open-source coding, and the assurance of data privacy and sovereignty. That latter component is crucial for adherence to the European Union’s GDPR requirements.

Even so, Silicon Valley’s first, second and third-largest public cloud companies plan to support and contribute to GAIA-X. GAIA-X project leaders say that’s OK, as long as those vendors “clearly share the values and ambitions of GAIA-X – data sovereignty and data availability – and fulfill the common rules for participation.”

Founding members of GAIA-X include 22 companies: Amadeus, Atos, Beckhoff, Bosch, BMW, Dassault Systemes, DE-CIX, Deutsche Telekom, Docaposte, EDF, Fraunhofer, German Edge Cloud, Institut Mines Telecom, International Data Spaces Association, Orange, 3DS Outscale, OVHcloud, PlusServer, Safran, SAP, Scaleway and Siemens. More than 250 other organizations and associations also are involved, as well as representatives from seven countries and the European Union.

Participants are preparing to launch more use cases by the end of this year for various sectors. Those include finance, health care and science.