Much as it might seem as if the cloud computing market is all wrapped up by the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, OVH Group is betting there’s still plenty of room for new rivals.

Today the French hosting and cloud services provider expanded its entry into the U.S. cloud market by announcing new hosted private cloud offerings based on the vCloud Air business it acquired earlier this year from VMware Inc.

The updated product line includes an enterprise dedicated private cloud built on VMware’s software-defined data center and the latest processors from Intel Corp. that provides companies physically isolated computing environments not shared with other companies. The service will be available starting in the Eastern U.S. region along with the United Kingdom and Germany, with more regions to be added in the first half of next year.

There’s also a new disaster recovery service that can use a variety of software options. And OVH is offering its hosted private cloud service coupled with VMware’s new HCX technology announced in September, which allows customers to move virtualized computing jobs among private data centers and OVH’s public cloud.

They’re the first new products to come out of acquisition in April of VMware’s vCloud Air service by OVH, which is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. OVH US President and Chief Executive Russell Reeder said in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE that the announcements are the result of the integration of 200 employees from vCloud Air into OVH.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity as the business world goes to the hybrid cloud,” he said, referring to the reality that many companies need to operate both in their own private data centers for regulatory or data governance compliance and in the public cloud for the ability to access computing, storage and applications more flexibly on demand. “The whole world isn’t going to all public cloud.”

The new offerings update the vCloud Air technology OVH acquired from VMware, which were getting long in the tooth in a fast-moving cloud computing industry.

“The vCloud Air hardware stack was fairly dated,” said Brian Kuhn, OVH US’s chief digital officer. For instance, it didn’t offer the latest Intel chips or the ability to provision servers on demand and in different sizes, all of which OVH will now be offering.

On the software side, he added, VMware’s vCloud Director cloud computing management tool was “old and annoying to customers.” The new offerings, he said, are intended to modernize both. “This is going to be a good turning point to show how OVH will enter the U.S. market,” he said.

Reeder acknowledged that cloud computing is coalescing around a few leaders, but he contended there’s still room for more, especially outside the purely public clouds. And one advantage he claims for OVH is a 50 percent lower cost than the leading public clouds. “It doesn’t have to be this super-expensive, ‘I won’t get fired’ solution,” he said. “You don’t have to be that name brand.”

OVH operates 27 data centers and 33 points of presence or access points to the internet around the world. It plans to expand to 50 data centers in the next three years with $1.5 billion in investment.

Reeder offered more details on OVH’s plans in an interview in late August at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio:

Photo: OVH