Read enough of technology news and blog sites, and you might come away thinking that only popular U.S. startups and the Central Intelligence Agency use the cloud. But you’d be wrong.
GigaOM held its inaugural Structure: Europe conference in Amsterdam last year and, based on a Friday blog post by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, we could have populated a good portion of the schedule just with Dutch companies using Amazon Web Services. The cloud is about a lot more than AWS, of course, but it is a bellweather company and where it has users, one has to assume cloud computing is alive and well. And it seems there are a lot of users in Europe.
So which European companies are using AWS? Vogels’s list is long, impressive and, admittedly, focused on Holland: Nokia Siemens; Kempinski; News International; Royal Dutch Shell; Unilever; Essent; Tom Tom; and Ohpen.
When it comes to cloud users of all sorts, though, those companies — some of which are household names (for better or worse) — are just the tip of the iceberg. As Vogels notes, there are plenty other large companies using AWS, and even more startups.
However, there are other cloud providers and there is private cloud software, too. There are AWS users that Vogels didn’t note. This year, we’re hosting Structure: Europe in London — less than two weeks away, on Sept. 18 and 19 — and we have an impressive lineup of companies and organizations using both. Among them:
- BMW
- CERN
- Spotify
- European Space Agency
- The U.K. government
There’s also a burgeoning industry for cloud providers in Europe (which will perhaps see a spike in interest after all the NSA revelations in the past few months). We have number of them, including CloudSigma, ElasticHosts, Flexiant, OnApp, ProfitBricks and UpCloud.
U.S. providers with a presence in Europe (aside from AWS) include Google, Microsoft, Rackspace and VMware. We’ll have all of them, too. Global companies, such as Facebook and Netflix, that know a thing about running cloud applications will also take the stage.
So if you’re in the vicinity of London on Sept. 18 and 19, and you’re interested in how European companies are using the array of cloud computing technologies around, there are worse places to be than Structure: Europe.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Markus Pfaff.
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