OVHcloud aiming to grow APAC partner ecosystem

“Our partner program in OVHcloud is ever evolving. We review it every year, and of course, we want to make sure our partners benefit the most from it,” comments Jeff Lee, partner program lead for APAC at OVHcloud.

While OVHcloud continues to make the headlines in Europe, the infrastructure service provider is also keeping tabs on the Asia Pacific region. The French-headquartered cloud company has been growing its data centers in the region, with three in Sydney and two in Singapore, to support the growing demand for its services.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Jeff Lee, partner program lead for APAC at OVHcloud shared how the company is looking to grow its partner ecosystem as it looks to build on its presence and success in the region.

“Our partner program in OVHcloud is ever evolving. We review it every year, and of course, we want to make sure our partners benefit the most from it,” said Lee, who was recently featured in CRN Asia’s Channel Leaders Asia 2025 as well.

Lee explained that OVHcloud is looking to engage with managed service providers (MSPs) as well as positioning themselves as an infrastructure service provider.

“We have customers that come to us and realize they need an MSP. And because of our limited capacity, we work together with our partners to provide that managed service to our customers,” added Lee.

Lee pointed out that OVHcloud engages with both MSPs and value-added resellers (VARs). This enables partners to not only resell their service but also engage on professional services to build their own solutions.

“For example, we have AI partners. They take our infrastructure, build their localized AI-driven solutions and then provide it to their market to address the market needs. This is how we work. There are different parts of value-added service resellers and MSPs,” explained Lee.

Growth in APAC

According to Lee, in Asia Pacific, they have three focus regions – India, Southeast Asia and Australia, and their partners are mainly spread across the region.

The partners in each focus region also have their own set of challenges with customers. In the Indian region, Lee said customers have concerns on cost optimization and data residency. In the Southeast Asian region, the challenges are more on the skills gaps that they are hoping to close. Over in Australia, Lee mentioned that customers are challenged when it comes sustainability requirements.

“Our partners could potentially jump in to help with the skills gap challenge in Southeast Asia, because they have the expertise, and they have the capacity to address these concerns. And this is what our partner program is all about as well. We want to empower partners to solve these challenges,” said Lee.

Explaining further about the partner program, Lee said that OVHcloud provides exclusive training for partners, whereby they can go online and complete it at their own pace. The intention is to make sure partners are certified, which is also how OVHcloud invests in partners.

“Our customers reside in different locations, different regions. We want local partners that can comply with local regulations. Regarding the skills our partners provide, we want to make sure they are certified. We invest heavily and have a team behind training and certification just to make sure that we are delivering the right tools and contents to our partners. This also ensures they are capable of delivering the infrastructure and the solutions to their customers,” added Lee.

At the same time, Lee stated that OVHcloud understands that partners from different markets in APAC have different needs. As such, they need to offer solutions and talent to the local market itself, something which Lee believes OVHcloud is doing extremely well.

“We have offices in various locations, and we offer local perspective with a global mind of course. And we want our partners to really benefit from the technology. And I would see that as a key differentiator for the partner program itself,” said Lee.

Another interesting point highlighted by Lee is that OVHcloud emphasizes partners with partners communication. What this means, if a partner needs specific solutions, OVHcloud is happy to get two partners to work together.

“We are offering the underlying infrastructure as a unified solution. So, this means partner A can work with partner B. We encourage this actually. Partners are allowed to communicate with other partners to work together to go in for one project, for example. And my hope for partners this year is that we want our partners to grow further with us,” explained Lee.

On growing its partner ecosystem, Lee believes with APAC being one of the fastest growing regions, OVHcloud wants to get more partners as well, especially with the potential opportunity and demand in the region.

Moving forward, Lee believes that having a strong partner ecosystem will be key for OVHcloud’s growth in the region.

“From the global perspective and from the customer perspective as well, we want to be able to grow our partners and also customers as well. The ecosystem is particularly important to us because we realize obviously that we can't work alone, and we rely heavily on the ecosystem. So apart from the partner ecosystem, there's also the startup ecosystem as well. We have programs that we run concurrently with all the clusters,” said Lee.

Apart from the customer base that OVHcloud is building and servicing, Lee pointed out that OVHcloud also prioritizes the ecosystem and partner startups. Referring to stats by PwC, Lee said that 6% of partners of partners in APAC are more likely to forge partnerships while 70% of enterprises would need an MSP to help them navigate and manage IT challenges in APAC.

“We do see that potential. And our customers prefer to deal with the partners more than dealing with the vendor and getting problems solved and issues addressed,” said Lee

Demand for AI solutions

With businesses looking to invest in more GenAI use cases, Lee also mentioned that OVHcloud has witnessed an increase in demand for AI from their customers as well.

“Two years ago, when I was speaking to customers, I didn’t really hear a lot of conversation around AI. There were some on the compute and storage side, but that focused more on automating process. Today, it's different. When we talk about GenAI, businesses are looking to create something for the industry that makes an impact,” said Lee.

As such, OVHcloud is focused on ensuring partners are capable of dealing with demands, especially when it comes to data management.

“Customers are concerned with where the data resides. And how do we protect that data. So, we have a saying at OVHcloud, whereby data stays your data. It means that we empower our partners and customers and give autonomy to our partners and customers to manage their own data. Having said that, we don't interfere with their data,” explained Lee.

Apart from data concerns, there are also challenges when it comes to skills, which OVHcloud is dealing with their partners to solve.

“We do see that our partners have that process, that skill. So, what we do is, we offer enablement. It's more like a cross-knowledge transfer and not just us sharing with them. Of course, there are some parts of it they are sharing with us as well. And we do appreciate that coming from our partners,” Lee said.

As OVHcloud is a European cloud service provider, Lee also highlighted that partners and customers do not need to be concerned on any geopolitical situations that could result from tariffs, sanctions or such between the US and China.

“I do see this is one of the factors when it comes to our customers and partners choosing cloud adoption. We are in a good position because we steer clear of all the geopolitical issues or matters. And I do see that we stand a better chance,” concluded Lee.