CISPE Pumps €1 Million Of Microsoft's Money Into Fulcrum
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
An alliance of cloud service providers in Europe is investing 1 million into the Fulcrum Project, an open source cloud federation tech that gives an alternative to local customers anxious about using US hypercalers.
Speaking to The Register, Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General at the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) association, explained that as part of the settlement reached with Microsoft last year an innovation fund was set up using Microsoft's cash.
Some 1 million of that has now been allocated to Fulcrum, an open source project to aggregate products from smaller tech vendors to rival the hyperscalers, he said.
"It's happening," he said. "There's been work going on for over a year on this, you know, coding and everything, testing, proof of concept...
"We cannot wait another five years. I mean, the sector lost half of its market share in four years to hyperscalers."
According to CISPE, the project marks "a significant step towards European cloud sovereignty" and is designed to "enable European cloud providers to pool and federate their infrastructures, offering a scalable and competitive alternative to foreign-controlled hyperscale cloud providers."
[...] Led by Opiquad, the open source code of the Fulcrum Core Project was officially unveiled at last week's CloudConf in Turin, Italy. Things are moving fast - Mingorance told us the team is aiming for July 2025 for "the first aggregated services available for purchase composition."
Emile Chalouhi, CEO of Opiquad, told The Register, "I think this is the only way to actually be able to finally create a common digital market.
"Smaller providers have access to resources that they didn't have before, and in locations where they didn't have them before."
[...] "Our goal here is to go to the market ASAP. We don't have all the superstructures that you might have in a lot of these other European projects.
"We don't have to mediate with the politicians or with a public project or with all these things. We're just building it, bottom-up to go live, and everything that's really bottom-up needs to be open, public, and go to the market fast."
[...] There is growing unease in Europe from some customers in the public and the private sector that are no longer happy to rely on US-headquartered cloud providers, so it seems the Trump administration is a galvanizing force for change overseas as well as on US soil... or in the clouds.
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