This article is based on reporting originally published by cloudcomputing-news.net, covering a panel session at Cloud Expo Europe featuring executives from IBM, OVH, and Rackspace.
A Market Maturing — But Not Yet Grown Up
Analyst firm Cloud Spectator published a report around this time examining the relationship between price and performance across cloud providers. Its findings echoed earlier studies: the largest hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — are not always the best fit for every organisation when compared with high-performance, lower-cost specialists. OVH, for example, bucked the typical narrative by ranking second in that report despite being considerably smaller than the hyperscaler giants.
A panel session at Cloud Expo Europe brought together senior voices from IBM, OVH, and Rackspace to address how the biggest names in cloud are adapting their strategies in response to a more sophisticated customer base and a more crowded market.
IBM: From Cloud Awareness to Business Innovation
Rene Bostic, Technical Vice President of Innovation and New Technologies at IBM Cloud, described a marked shift in how organisations think about cloud. Two years prior, IBM’s primary job was helping customers understand what cloud even was. By the time of this panel, customers had largely cleared that hurdle.
“Our customers understand what cloud is, they understand the use cases. The focus now is on business innovation. How can you monetise the cloud environments that you have — how can you make sure your startup companies and other companies won’t take your market share away fast?”
Rene Bostic, Technical VP of Innovation and New Technologies, IBM Cloud
Bostic illustrated this with a practical example: IBM’s integration of Watson AI into customer service workflows. Watson analyses the tone of incoming customer communications — identifying whether a caller is frustrated, calm, or upset — and helps agents tailor their responses accordingly. This kind of applied AI sits on top of cloud infrastructure in a way that is effectively invisible to the end user.
Bostic also described an insurance provider use case in which IBM integrated its cloud platform with The Weather Company (acquired by IBM in early 2016) via its API. The system sends real-time alerts to policyholders based on weather conditions — for example, warning a user that a hailstorm is approaching and suggesting they move their vehicle under cover. The practical result is fewer claims. Crucially, the policyholder has no visibility into which cloud infrastructure is running the service.
OVH: Avoiding Vendor Lock-In at All Costs
Russell Reeder, President and CEO of OVH US, made a strong case for open-source approaches as the antidote to the vendor lock-in that has burned organisations in the past. His message was straightforward: customers who have experienced lock-in once are deeply motivated to avoid it again.
“As a customer, people should be really afraid of the cloud — and choosing the wrong cloud provider and being locked in.”
Russell Reeder, President and CEO, OVH US
To address the skills gap from his organisation’s perspective, OVH has been building self-service tooling so that customers who have the technical capability can manage their own migrations without needing to engage external consultants or wait on provider support teams.
Despite the industry’s growing maturity, Reeder emphasised that cloud adoption is still in its early chapters. Alex Hilton, CEO of the Cloud Industry Forum and session moderator, offered a more colourful take: he described the cloud as “adolescent” — capable and increasingly self-aware, but not yet fully formed.
Rackspace: Managed Services Across a Multi-Cloud World
Rackspace’s strategic repositioning — from operating its own public cloud to providing managed services across the major public cloud platforms — was a central topic. Lee James, Rackspace’s Chief Technology Officer, articulated the company’s working assumption clearly: their customers are already operating in a multi-cloud environment, and Rackspace’s job is to broker and optimise that reality.
“For us, it’s not about saying ‘how do you justify the support on top of AWS?’ — we expect all of you to be in a multi-cloud world, so how do we broker that for you? How do we optimise that for you?”
Lee James, CTO, Rackspace
James backed this up with two concrete customer examples. A furniture retailer benefits from elastic scaling — ramping capacity up or down in line with seasonal demand fluctuations. A food manufacturer runs its entire operation on AWS, with Rackspace actively managing cost optimisation on its behalf. Notably, Rackspace’s commitment to service extends to provider transitions: if a customer decides to switch cloud providers, Rackspace will migrate them at no charge.
Rackspace has also invested in internal training infrastructure, opening a dedicated “university” to develop cloud skills within its own workforce — a response, at least in part, to the wider industry skills shortage.
The Skills Gap: Still Unresolved
All three panellists acknowledged the cloud skills gap as a persistent, unresolved problem. Across the industry, demand for engineers and architects with hands-on cloud experience continues to outpace supply. Each provider is approaching the problem differently:
- OVH is investing in self-service tooling so that technically capable customers can handle migrations themselves, reducing dependency on scarce skilled labour.
- Rackspace has created internal training through its cloud university to upskill its own staff.
- IBM is focusing increasingly on cloud-native application development as a way to build skills organically within the enterprises it works with.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams
The panel’s discussion surfaces several themes that remain directly relevant for DevOps engineers and platform teams making architectural decisions:
- Multi-cloud is the default, not the exception. Organisations should plan for heterogeneous environments rather than betting on a single provider.
- Vendor lock-in is a genuine risk. Favour open standards, portable container orchestration, and abstraction layers that allow workloads to move between providers.
- Managed services add measurable value. For teams without deep cloud expertise, managed services can deliver cost optimisation and operational stability that would be difficult to achieve internally.
- Cloud-native design matters. Applications built with cloud-native principles — stateless services, horizontal scalability, infrastructure-as-code — are inherently more portable and easier to optimise across providers.
- Skills investment is non-negotiable. Whether through internal training programmes or self-service platform tooling, closing the skills gap is a prerequisite for realising the value of cloud investment.
The broader message from Cloud Expo Europe was one of cautious optimism. Cloud infrastructure has matured significantly, but the industry is still working through the implications — for skills, for architecture, and for the competitive dynamics between providers of every size.