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Dmitry Panenkov (emma): Connecting the European Cloud
With recent political changes in the US, European companies may find themselves reassessing their heavy reliance on American cloud services. Meanwhile, both cloud usage and the adoption of multi-cloud strategies are on the rise. We talked with Dmitry Panenkov, founder and CEO of cloud management platform emma, about Luxembourg’s role in providing an alternative more in line with European policies such as sovereignty and security.
What is emma, and how did you get started?
Imagine that you have a cloud service you really need from one provider, but you also want to use another provider. You need a lot of tools to connect them. We make that easy, and help companies save a lot of money. The idea came when I was working in sales, seeing customers struggling with management over different cloud environments. I hired two developers, and we started to build a cloud management platform. We started in Eastern Europe but soon we realised that it's hard to build a team there because of regulatory limitations. Then Luxinnovation reached out and said, OK, we have a startup programme where you can get up to €150,000 of equity-free funding, just because you're good enough and you're building something. That's why we moved into Luxembourg.
How else has being in Luxembourg helped?
We’re in touch with different ministers here and everyone supports us. The trade missions open the door for small companies like ours to expand into new regions, and we appreciate that very, very much. One of the amazing things when we arrived in Luxembourg was that the Ministry of Economy introduced us to KPMG and later to PricewaterhouseCoopers, who said, OK, we have customers here in Luxembourg who are interested in this solution, because the competitors are from the USA and everyone in Europe wants to work with European companies. That gave us access to bigger organisations who wouldn’t otherwise have talked with us. And then there are little things, like getting a residence permit for an employee within twelve days, or how the banks help our employees set up accounts when they arrive. That's all cool.
“The trade missions open the door for small companies like ours, and we appreciate that very much.”
©DR
What do you think of Luxembourg’s data centres?
A lot has been invested in them. These are tier four data centres, military grade protection, they are interconnected and that's super cool. But what we really need to do is educate the data centre sales teams on why people should want to store data in Luxembourg, because it's not obvious for everyone in the marketplace. It's in the middle of Europe, so it's well connected. You have 200 kilometres to Frankfurt’s peering centre and you can transfer the data onwards to the United States or wherever. But the important thing with the Luxembourgish data centre ecosystem is that you can create a failover cluster, so your applications are always up and running - 100% secure, 100% sovereign. And with emma’s help, you can connect these environments with any cloud service provider.