An alliance of cloud service providers in Europe is investing €1 million into the Fulcrum Project, an open source cloud federation tech that gives an alternative to local customers anxious about using US hypercalers.
Speaking to The Register, Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General at the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) association, explained that as part of the settlement reached with Microsoft last year an innovation fund was set up using Microsoft's cash.
Some €1 million of that has now been allocated to Fulcrum, an open source project to aggregate products from smaller tech vendors to rival the hyperscalers, he said.
"It's happening," he said. "There's been work going on for over a year on this, you know, coding and everything, testing, proof of concept...
"We cannot wait another five years. I mean, the sector lost half of its market share in four years to hyperscalers."
According to CISPE, the project marks "a significant step towards European cloud sovereignty" and is designed to "enable European cloud providers to pool and federate their infrastructures, offering a scalable and competitive alternative to foreign-controlled hyperscale cloud providers."
Where does the €1 million Fulcrum funding come from? Back in 2022, CISPE alleged to EU competition authorities that Microsoft charged up to five times more to run certain software on third party infrastructure than on Azure.
Cispe also had beef over the technical adjustments needed to run other programs on rival cloud services. In return for withdrawing that complaint, the Windows giant agreed in July 2024 to pay a lump sum and create an Azure Stack for hosts. The latter has yet to materialize, although at least part of the cash injection from the Windows maker was allocated to the Fulcrum Project.
The Fulcrum Project is an open source digital exchange that enables service providers to federate distributed cloud services. The theory is that by connecting up service providers in this way, it will be possible to match the scale, reach, and capabilities of hyperscale cloud providers. The project is also open to all, meaning that the hyperscalers could sign up, although the aim is clearly to provide a European alternative to the Big Three (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud).
Led by Opiquad, the open source code of the Fulcrum Core Project was officially unveiled at last week's CloudConf in Turin, Italy. Things are moving fast – Mingorance told us the team is aiming for July 2025 for "the first aggregated services available for purchase composition."
Emile Chalouhi, CEO of Opiquad, told The Register, "I think this is the only way to actually be able to finally create a common digital market.
"Smaller providers have access to resources that they didn't have before, and in locations where they didn't have them before."
It is difficult not to think about other initiatives built to help smaller European players compete with the hyperscalers that have come and gone over the years. Mingorance insisted this latest approach – federating the resources of smaller players – is not the same as prior attempts to create an "Airbus" of cloud computing.
How will Fulcrum be different? Chalouhi said, "We're very pragmatic, and we're industry-oriented and market-oriented.
"Our goal here is to go to the market ASAP. We don't have all the superstructures that you might have in a lot of these other European projects.
"We don't have to mediate with the politicians or with a public project or with all these things. We're just building it, bottom-up to go live, and everything that's really bottom-up needs to be open, public, and go to the market fast."
Mark Boost of UK cloud vendor Civo said he was aware of the initiative, but Civo was not yet involved in it. "In the EU these types of initiatives are springing up everywhere," he observed.
"Most important it shows how important digital sovereignty is in such uncertain times, consumers need choice, and Civo welcomes any industry initiatives that educate and drive choice - but I'm disappointed that the UK appears to be more complacent."
There is growing unease in Europe from some customers in the public and the private sector that are no longer happy to rely on US-headquartered cloud providers, so it seems the Trump administration is a galvanizing force for change overseas as well as on US soil... or in the clouds. ®