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OVH has new CEO now!!!
So OVH now has Laurent Allard as its new CEO, Octave "Oles" Klaba has left the seat of CEO but says that he will remain attached to technology. Oles has always been criticized for his inconsistency with strategies & offerings be it every changing pricing models, adding & removing product lines within days & sometimes hours without prior notice & his apparent unwillingness to improve support with very basic issues like validation of customer accounts & server delivery times. What impact do you think this change would have on OVH & the large portion of budget market that it corners?
OVH change of CEO
- What impact do you think this would have on OVH & large portion of the budget market it corners?114 votes
- Positive21.05%
- Negative11.40%
- Things will remain same they are right now14.04%
- Only time will tell53.51%
Comments
When you raise a shit ton of money (hundreds of millions IIRC), you run the risk of losing your position as CEO. Investors etc wont buy into 2gbp servers etc for long. Why dump tons of money into a company that targets the low end market when you can target high end markets. Never understood their obsession with targeting the cheap as shit market.
When you put it like that, it makes me question (fear really) that OVH will be moving out of the low end market and revamping their service with higher prices.
New CEO should make decisions to provide better support to customers.
I think Allard given his background will be focussed on developing the high end relationships. Kimsufi will have had it's day, it's good for a cheap bit of poorly supported hardware but it really does not fit anywhere within the direction OVH needs to go in order to satisfy investors.
Development of areas like Hubic to the residential markets makes sense as does some other elements but they are as @incero notes, spending to much time and effort in the budget market that will never bring worthwhile returns.
I think his appointment is good though, Oles was never CEO material, he knew it himself.
They can't move out. They have already invested in huge data centers and a lot of low-endish hardware. They are not going to just throw it away and leave these huge data centers empty.
http://www.lesechos.fr/enjeux/business-stories/business-case/0204111947565-hebergement-web-ovh-se-donne-les-moyens-de-ses-ambitions-1090482.php
I think some of the investors wanted someone to move them into more corporate (higher profit) businesses. OVH's profit margin is razor thin.
I think this is what is coming around to bite them though. The money invested to create these huge data centers and far too much of that costly space is being used to accommodate budget lines.
That can't be the way investors seen the company develop. Perhaps this is the first step to correcting that.
Oles just go back to his CTO seat.
Reasonable.
But should they focus on the "High-end" market, they have to come up with a reaaaaaaaaly good reason that why people use OVH rather than AWS, Azure, Rackspace or whatever. It's like Xiaomi: master the low-end market, then beat the sh*t out of Samsung.
Maybe OVH can start by sponsoring HET and dump a load of ads in it. Also pay Google to put their ads at the top of the search results, so Google can use the money to invest on their own GCE, and chances are, Google can the rest of the $$$ to provide Google Fiber in Toronto. Sounds good enough to me.
Just stop talking.
Imagine if OVH decide to sell/cancel the lease on all those Atom servers. We might see some pretty cheap Atom CPUs on EBay soon!
I am sure they are made in house, no lease and they wont end up on Ebay.
The motherboards, HDDs, RAM modules are standard. The PSUs and cases are custom.
Though we are talking about 5+ years old hardware, i doubt they would sell too well, even on ebay. Unless of course they are sold very cheap.
Made in house and end in basement? XD
Not the CPUs I would imagine, they probably just assemble them together
Oles might have been "inconsistent", but you could catch some good deals in between his swings of inconsistency. And they are known to practically* ** never raise prices on existing users.
...* I believe in one case (~2011?) they started charging for IPv4 addresses that were initially included for free with some other services, or promised as "setup fee only".
...** Oh, and that incident with +1EUR on everything to "pay for Anti-DDoS protection".
@rm_ didn't they increase the price for everyone when they starded including DDoS protection?
By the way everything on kimsufi.com is out of stock at the moment.
Yep just remembered and added.
Aside from that, some people still have the KS1 N2800/500GB for 3 EUR/month.
yes, and mine is paid until 08.11.2017, so they can't modify the price
But they can add a fee to your account - just like any other company.
A "surcharge" or "premium" for this or that, and if you want to keep your account you need to pay it.
The data centers aren't instantly useless because they don't house dirt cheap servers.
When you're faced with losses or a failing business model, you have two choices . . . continue on the same downward path until you are driven into the ground, or cut your losses and try to make a new go.
As long as they continue to have huge datacenters to fill they will keep bottom feeding.
Once their data centers are full up you can probably kiss the low end prices goodbye
They are just going to build more. GRA2 is under construction: https://www.ovh.com/us/about-us/datacenters.xml
in total these two will house 400K servers, 3 times more than of all 6 RBX DCs combined!
At the outskirts of some French village, supposedly with cheap power nearby and such density, all of this is going to be very cheap per server.
And there's never such thing as "DC full" and that's it. There's always churn with people cancelling their servers and freeing up space.
Where do you think the money for building more and more datacenters is supposed to come from? The money fairy? Do you think investors will keep giving money forever with no expectation of a good return?
Their strategy is quite obvious to me. I don't have any cheap servers with them clouding my judgment on such things.
Should we prepay for a year in advance to keep our service? This is a very bad news for the LEB market. Surely they will discontinue the low-end brands, which will increase demand and push price up with all competitors (Online.net, Hetzner, may be even Delimiter). Can OVH cancel/discontinue prepaid service?
Do you think GRA1 operates at a loss carrying those N2800/500G for 4.99 EUR currently? I don't. And it's not like this is even a unique phenomenon anymore, you can get servers around those same 5 EUR from other companies too (Online.net and Digicube).
This seems like part of their overall strategy - getting out of budget and into high end.. What budget does is help fill up DCs and make sure you can justify building more.
It's like providers offering $5/yr VPS's with 1 or multiple IPv4. They're utilizing their IPv4 space so they can justify more. You'll get churn, you can cancel product lines, etc so you can reclaim that space later on. But in that time you've been able to justify huge blocks, have hardware that pays for itself, etc.
Look at the number of DCs and bandwidth OVH has at their disposal now - if they start phasing out budget lines, they can now start putting higher end customers in.
Bottom line: Get your Kimsufi & SYS boxes now. These may be less common going forward. I highly doubt they'll start pulling products from folks, as that creates a ton of headaches & negative press. But it's quite possible they'll stop offering new services and just reclaim the space as folks drop off/upgrade to newer hardware.
And this is based on what exactly, the above posts here on LET?
Yes they have segmented their offers into high-end, mid and low-end brands (OVH proper, SYS and Kimsufi). But can you provide any proof that there is a plan to phase out the latter two?
Forward planning for whats to come?
They may be treated to run independently for all we know.
@rm_ Purely speculating based on recent changes, recent funding injection, etc. From a business standpoint it just makes sense. Oles has tweeted a few times about how dedicated isn't the future, it's all about the 'cloud', etc. Who knows though.