The art of listening - the key to successful cloud products!

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” Legendary investor Bernard Baruch had it right. Indeed, my career has confirmed time and time again that the key to successful products is making what people want. By listening to their needs. And that’s just what we’ve done at Scaleway, to conceive this quarter’s new offerings.

AI is naturally one of the most-requested needs right now. We have a waiting list of over two hundred companies interested in our next AI product, many of whom are starting to work with Scaleway specifically for it! Managed Inference will be our first AI software offering, and the first of its kind from a European cloud provider. It will allow our clients to leverage open source models - Llama3, Mixtral, Wizard LM & Sentence - on a sovereign infrastructure. Why is this important? Firstly, because it offers a ready-to-use solution to run your own applications, such as chatbots. It’s even compatible with OpenAI’s APIs, so you can easily transfer data to it. Secondly, because it only uses Europe-based hardware, your data will not be accessible by non-EU authorities, nor will it be used to train other US or Asian models.Thirdly, because we only use open source models, the results will be more explainable and controllable. And finally, as our AI GPUs are based in one of Europe’s most sustainable data centers, your AI impact is minimized. You asked for alternatives to the market dominators: we listened!

We also heard clients’ requests for tighter security. That’s now the case with Encryption at rest on S3 object storage and our managed databases, which means all data is now encrypted by default. It’s a reassuring move for all of our clients, and for their clients by extension. Our next step will be to encrypt all data transfers. At a time when IT security is at the forefront of concerns - in particular with the imminent Olympic Games - Scaleway is answering those questions.

Scaleway listens to the needs of all of its clients, including startups, many of which often rely on Serverless solutions, rather than on historical IT infrastructures. Why? Because Serverless is pay-per-use, versus always-on solutions. So we’re completing our offering today with Serverless SQL Database, the Serverless version of our PostgresQL offering, to simplify your growth even more!

We even have our ear to the ground in domains you might not expect to find us! Scaleway is renowned for making all of its software in-house, based on open source principles. But sometimes, to meet all clients’ needs, you need to make exceptions. Enter Instances with Windows, which means that companies used to Microsoft environments (Office365, etc) can work with Scaleway instances for the very first time. We remain true to our principle of “no lock-ins with US providers” by offering alternative options: you have the choice to work with Windows if it suits your needs better; if not, feel free to look at our other instance offers!

Last but by no means least, we heard from our Europe-based clients looking to expand elsewhere in the world, but keen to do so on Scaleway infrastructure. We listened, by providing Dedibox VPS, which makes our private server offer available in a total of 65 cities, in over 50 different countries worldwide. Consider them as satellites to establish your first international presences. We remain, as ever, at your service…

For more information on our Q2 launches, all the product details here!