Seven Dutch cloud service providers are planning to work together to form a “serious alternative” to US big tech when it comes to government contracts, the NRC reported on Wednesday.
Centric, KPN, Info Support, Intermax, Nebul, Previder and Uniserver have agreed to use the same technical standards to make it easy to move between different suppliers and to make it possible to take on larger projects, the paper said.
The move has been prompted by the potential sale of Solvinity, which provides cloud services for the government’s Digid digital identity system, to US firm Kyndryl. As yet, the deal has not been approved by the economic affairs ministry.
If one of the companies participating in the Open Cloud Alliantie project is taken over by a non-European company, the others will take over its role, so the data always remains in Dutch hands.
Politicians across Europe want to lessen the bloc’s reliance on US technology, given the unpredictability of the current regime. At the same time, the NRC says governments and large companies are concerned about the potential disruption which could follow if they switch to smaller providers.
An analysis by NOS of 16,500 domain names used by government bodies, hospitals, schools and other essential organisations shows that 67% are linked to at least one American cloud service.
Dutch competition watchdog ACM has reacted positively to the first news of the alliance. “In general, alliances such as this one can boost market forces by creating new players which are in a better position to compete with large US providers,” chief executive Martijn Snoep told the paper.
“We are creating jobs in the Netherlands. Our companies and employees pay tax in the Netherlands,” the seven firms say in their manifesto. “The money will remain in circulation in our economy. That is not a cost, it is an investment.”
Between them, the seven companies have a current turnover of some €2.5 billion a year.
“We are good at different things,” Ludo Baauw, chief executive at the Intermax Group, told the NRC. “This is not about price fixing and we remain competitors when it comes to winning contracts. But I would rather a competitor from the Netherlands won than big tech Americans.”
