The interview
Q: What is your name?
I'm Yann Lechelle, CEO of Scaleway.
Q: What is your product?
Scaleway is a French hosting company that helps companies deploy applications on different types of Cloud infrastructures: serverless, containerisation and bare metal architectures. Our clients can choose where to store their data and adapt functionalities and architectures to their needs in a European ecosystem that is entirely secure and eco-responsible. Scaleway now has eight data centres, all located in Europe (the Netherlands, Poland and three in the Paris region) and all carbon-neutral, the first company of its kind in Europe.
Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?
PaaS/IaaS
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
The choice of Scaleway seems increasingly obvious for many companies of all sizes, since our European multi-cloud solution offers better performance and forward looking features such as serverless services, which our main competitor and market leader AWS does not provide. We are also not subject to extra-territorial licenses, but remain compatible with them, which makes for a simpler and more reassuring transition for potential new customers. The fact that all of Scaleway's data centres are located in Europe is an increasingly convincing argument for companies, especially as Scaleway owns not only the data centres but also all of the software used to operate them, thus guaranteeing the sovereignty and security of the data stored.
Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?
Scaleway's Cloud ecosystem is largely based on open source. We use Redis, PostgreSQL and many other open source components. Code bricks are available to customers, which means that, for example, it is possible to switch from AWS Object Storage with just one line of code.
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
Since launching our IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in 2015, we have continued to grow and today employ 500 employees for developing and optimising solutions for more than 25,000 companies in 160 countries and over 100,000 developer clients using Scaleway as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) solution.