With sales of €43 million in 2016, Cloud Temple is more than ever targeting sales of €100 million by 2020!
Cloud Temple, a major French cloud player
Cloud Temple was born out of the separation of the Security and Cloud Computing activities of Intrinsec.
Intrinsec has a very strong reputation in security; it was complicated to promote our expertise in outsourcing and cloud computing services as effectively. On the one hand, we have security experts who have been carrying out intrusion tests for more than 20 years and have unique feedback from experience in France. On the other hand, we have an outsourcer operating in the cloud, which is developing and growing extremely fast.
Today, Cloud Temple is one of France's leading cloud players, with its positioning as a cloud provider combined with transformation, application refactoring and outsourcing services.
Cloud Temple generated sales of €43 million in 2016 and €50 million excluding acquisitions in 2017. The provision of Infrastructure as a Service services accounts for almost 50% of Cloud Temple's turnover.
The company is also working with new customers such as the Véolia Group and the Avril Group.
Appointment of a two-man General Management team to initiate a strategic shift
Successively Integrator, Architect, Production Director, Pre-Sales Director and then Business Director at Cloud Temple, Christophe Lesur embodies the company's culture, with total versatility in all areas. Historically very close to CEO Franck Dubray and a partner in the company, he ensures that strategy and operations are closely aligned.
Sébastien Lescop joined Cloud Temple after a remarkable career in IT services in large organisations. He was successively Consultant, Project Director, Marketing Director, Production Director and former head of Econocom's Finance BU. His arrival in the team will enable Cloud Temple to benefit from his experience in order to develop an optimum level of quality in a context of strong growth (> 20% per year).
We are at a size where the issues to be addressed are numerous and complex. We need two brilliant minds to manage our operations. Their complementary business and technical skills give them a high degree of autonomy and confidence.
The aim of this duo is to develop the following points:
Going digital and overhauling our offering
The outsourcing business is changing radically, and Cloud Temple is at the forefront of this new transformation. Customers are no longer interested in simply running their IT; they are demanding support that increasingly incorporates a detailed understanding of their businesses in a digital environment.
Before the end of the year, Christophe Lesur and Sébastien Lescop will have to produce new offerings that incorporate this dimension, in particular with the creation of a structure of architects, experts, developers and project managers. These will evolve in parallel with the Service Centre to provide the high-end support that is now essential.
The hybrid switch and service centre transformations
Requirements are changing. Companies still want the Private Cloud for certain applications, "A large SAP system from a CAC 40 group should not be deployed on Azure or Amazon, it would be suicidal! "says Franck Dubray. These applications generally stay with Cloud Temple. However, these customers have thousands of servers alongside them: pre-production development environments and web farms. They explicitly ask for these to be migrated to Azure or AWS, while asking Cloud Temple to remain the operator. "For the past 18 months, we've been developing tools that enable the operations platform to manage both the applications on our infrastructure and those on Azure and Amazon, says Franck Dubray.
External growth: coherent acquisitions
Cloud Temple's external growth strategy, which began in 2014, is designed to meet both financial challenges and the need to align its portfolio of offerings with new market needs. A year ago, Cloud Temple invested in Advim, the French specialist in IT production. At the end of 2016, Netixia merged with Cloud Temple to become Cloud Temple's new Open Source and Agility centre of excellence in Tours.
As 2017 draws to a close, the focus is on the needs of businesses for support with their application refactoring. This major component in the digital transformation of businesses takes into account the methodological aspects of agile development and the technological aspects of continuous integration and infrastructure as code.
The conquest of French-speaking Africa
Cloud Temple is associated with a very large industrial company in Tunis, the Poulina Group, which accounts for around 2% of Tunisia's GDP. Thanks to this joint venture, Cloud Temple has the local skills (10% of the company's total workforce) to serve Africa, particularly the French-speaking countries of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Libya) and central Africa (Ivory Coast, Senegal, etc.).
With its Tunisian subsidiary, Cloud Temple has created a logistical backbone for its expansion in French-speaking Africa. Its flagship offerings are private cloud infrastructure services and SaaS messaging. Cloud Temple is the 1er player in the world to offer these service bricks on the African continent.
AI: towards a virtual assistant for system and network administrators
Over the past 3 years, Cloud Temple has built up a team of around a dozen people, as part of an ongoing drive to industrialise and automate its business. For many people, the administrator's activities are repetitive, automatable procedures; but all these operations still represent a lot of man-days! Cloud Temple would like to pass the baton to virtual assistants.
This project is being carried out in partnership with INSERM, CNRS and SUPELEC. The team includes 4 PhD students working on mathematics and AI, as well as developers for the agent integration.
The interim results are interesting, but we'll have to wait 2 to 4 years before we see something extremely surprising. Particularly in terms of our ability to bring down our IT production costs significantly. This is the next hurdle for outsourcers. Those who master these techniques will be able to call on half as many people and not the same profiles.