The Cloud service market is of primary importance, with a size of already nearly 190 B€ in the EU in 2022 and a forecasted annual growth of 13% over the coming decade. It acts as a key enabler in the majority of European industrial ecosystems.
Our report gives valuable insights into how Europe can addresses both legal and technical steps needed to enable Cloud interoperability.
The costs of cloud services have been rising rapidly in recent years, harming both the competitiveness of European industry and the purchasing power of European end customers in the context of inflation.
Despite the historical strengths of the EU in application software with leaders such as SAP, Dassault Systèmes, and Siemens Software… the EU ecosystem of Cloud Service Providers (CSP) remains small and limited in its ability to grow. EU players only own 16% market shares on the EU SaaS market, and this share tends to decrease over the years.
This situation is largely due to the oligopolistic situation on the EU Cloud market with 90% market shares being owned by three providers (AWS, Microsoft, and Google), inducing a distortion of competition in three ways:
Such situation is a threat for the digital sovereignty of the EU. The entire European economy is facing a risk of dependence given the importance cloud-based software is having in segments of our industry.
However, this oligopolistic situation and its consequences could be solved through the building of a legal and technical framework enabling full Cloud interoperability. The recent “Data Act” proposal is the opportunity to build such a framework, it already contains regulatory obligations related to Cloud interoperability and data portability, OSC would technical enable it.
Open Services Cloud is an open-source framework that aims to simplify the inherent complexity of the current Cloud offerings by covering multiple aspects:
Overall, the introduction of Open Services Cloud to the market would represent multiple advantages that would benefit all parties involved: