Keep Calm and Carry On Sovereign

Unpacking Digital Sovereignty and Guest Introductions Welcome to Optimize to Innovate, the show where we help organizations stop wasting money on things that don't add value to their business and understand the technologies that actually. We have some really experienced guests with us today on this topic, so let's declare independence from vague definitions across a few digital borders and work out whether sovereignty in the cloud is a practical strategy or a political storm with an API. Speaker 2 Hey, Jason. Yes, today's topic is all about digital sovereignty. So I'm going to start the episode by asking a simple question. Who really controls your data, your technology, and that infrastructure that your organization is depending on? We know that in the past few years, we've seen a lot of geopolitical tensions, if you will. They're rising, regulations becoming more complex, and this whole digital sovereignty topic. That's a term that's actually been around since the 90s, but it was something that was previously only really being discussed by specialists and policymakers. Recently, we've seen it really quickly becoming much more of a boardroom priority. So to help us to understand what that actually means in practice and perhaps some tips on what organizations should be doing about it, we're joined by two fantastic guests we've got David and Nelson. David, do you want to introduce yourself? Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm David Schneider. I go by David. I'm a pre sales lead consultant within the DACH region, the German speaking region within software one. My focus points are on, of course, digital sovereignty, but also cloud transformation in general, strategic advisory, so everything around operating models, governance models and so on and so on. So I'm spending my time working directly with customers from all industries and sectors on sovereignty targets, sovereignty transformations and so on. Looking forward to this. Speaker 2 Fantastic. A real expert. Thank you very much. David and Nelson, do you want to introduce yourself? Speaker 4 Sure. Thank you very much for the invitation, guys. It's a pleasure to be here today. So my name is Nelson Herrera. I'm account executive for the European institutions within sub 01, so for the Rumi region based in Brussels. And yeah, my actually what I do is to support institutions on the acquisition of different kind of technologies. So I'm in the intersection between the technologies, the institutions and of course sub 01 as a service provider for the European ecosystem and looking forward to changing the topic. Experts Define Digital Sovereignty and Its Challenges OK. Well, let's get to our first question, which is why is everyone talking about digital sovereignty? And Nelson, maybe if you can lead on that for us. Speaker 4 Sure. Well, I think that by experience in changing with different institutions that actually at the moment we have the pleasure to work with 76 of them. It's because technology is not longer I would say an operational topic or matter. It's just more a geopolitical, as Alex has mentioned, topics. So governments, companies, corporate sectors need to know in a very precision way who controls what and who control what. Start also with data. I think data is one of the, I would say richness of each different sectors in the world today, either private or public. And they need to understand how the infrastructure is impacted to how is control. What are the different critical tools software that they need to have or not? What do they need to to be doing to progress into advance? What happens if that actually cannot be continued, if the access is disrupted And I think that then digital software when it is the title that has been given to assess and to continue operating and making, you know independent decisions or right decisions. But I think we will discuss further on that. Speaker 2 Interestingly, AWS I think define they, they always like to try and simplify things and they say it's about control, compliance and continuity, which I think it really helps to, you know, boil it down to the essence. I mean, from your perspective, David, how would, how would you or how would we define it? Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. It's like so many people, so many organizations have their own kind of definition of what sovereignty means. Everyone has a different angle, Everyone has an opinion there. And I think the reason for that is that it's like a very multi factorial challenge that we're facing here. There's so many technical factors coming into this, but also regulatory factors and business or entrepreneurial factors, all different angles looking at the same kind of challenge, the same kind of issue. And I guess this is also what makes this whole thing exciting because, yeah, everyone has something to say about it. But I think one of the core questions is who defines what sovereignty actually means? And sure, we can look at 2, what's the, the providers, the cloud providers, for example, what they bring to the table and what they define as sovereignty, which is of course interesting and worth looking at. But of course their definition very conveniently usually matches their kind of offering that they're providing. Yeah, at at least between the lines you can read that there's a certain motivation behind that. In other instances, we have organizations, for example in Germany there's the Sendus, the like Center for Digital Sovereignty, which is like a public governmental organization that gives also a definition for this. I think or I'm sure we have this also in other markets in other regions as well. They're the definitions usually tend very strongly towards full autonomy and full open source approaches, which at least in some instances can be difficult to apply to an organization's overall business strategy. So it can be very tricky to navigate between those those two worlds. So it's a broad spectrum of kind of definitions that that we have there, which can confuse customers and organizations. So what I like to do with with our customers is to find a way on applying the more broader concepts of digital sovereignty to their individual needs and individual requirements and then built their own kind of definition, their own kind of digital sovereignty strategy for their individual use case here. And this is of course a task that takes more than one day. It can go very deep into an organization into the kind of value that the company brings also to the market. But I think this is a very nice approach that that companies can can use to find their own kind of way of navigating in this world. Digital Sovereignty: More Than Just Cloud Technology But I'm very interested of asking you, Nelson, how is your thoughts on this kind of general broader concept of digital sovereignty? Speaker 4 There's some something very interesting to have said to start with that when you mentioned examples to to speak about Germany, right. So of course I am in contact with European institutions where they're just not reside in Germany, they reside in the full European continent. And when this started, we just were speaking about cloud. And I think sovereignty is not, of course, when the when the concept started. I I mean, it is not of course just about cloud. It's inbade. I mean, it includes a lot of different angles. There is the first one that I would like to clarify when it started. Yeah. We have tendency to translate regulations in different ways. So if I give you an example, once the regulation is out, we have 27 ways to translate this and to understand it. So this is also something that it's has a lot of complexity when we look at the market, when we look at how different governments will actually understand this, how they will deploy it, how will they apply and also the companies what are located. And then when we are talking about sovereignity goes beyond cloud as a broader concept, right? Why? Because we will actually discuss about core activities, core Business Today. If I can give one specific thing on sovereignty beyond cloud, it's concerns for government, it concerns public data, it concerns national security, continuity of essential services. That's for public services. And it's important for us as it is as citizens, for companies, for corporate sectors. It's just more about business evolution, business resilience, regulatory compliancy, because they need to be compliant to what they actually are asked for. And of course, I do believe that for both, it's just avoiding excessive dependencies on different providers or on big providers. In both cases, this means that we need to both, both sectors need to understand what they are depending on, what they don't want to depend on anymore and how they can ensure, I would say credible solutions or choices. But of course, once again, it's it's just not the cloud because because beyond. In this example I have given you data, but I think I can go beyond data as well. And and and the least will be quite long. Speaker 2 Is it? It's really interesting actually, isn't it? Because a lot of people almost equate digital sovereignty to being almost anti cloud. So again, back to the context, as David was saying, from the position of that organization, what they need to do, what they're comfortable with, etcetera. Some of them are saying actually we, we want to go the opposite direction. And yet other organizations are saying, OK, well, how can we meet our digital sovereignty requirements whilst staying in the cloud? And all of that points to a technology conversation. But what you're saying, Nelson, is this isn't a technology conversation. Technology's underpinning it, Yes, but actually it's a far wider conversation around control of citizens core data, which is is not just a technology thing. Speaker 4 Yeah, if I give you an example, sovereignty today, I mean, of course, I'm not pretending that I I think I can talk more about sovereignty when it comes to technology. But if you opened your social medias today, you will have banking sovereignity, then we will talk. I mean, one of these days we will even have flying sovereignity. Each member state will have need to have an airplane or airline and and this is just used in this way and it's evolving. But of course it's what do we want to tackle first? Do we want to tackle software entity in which specific area when it comes to technology or is it cloud, is it data, is IT infrastructure, is it data centre? Or do we want to tackle all the software entity topics that are beyond our knowledge, maybe as professionals today? Understanding Why Digital Sovereignty Matters for All It's such a complex topic for any organization and and as they say, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So we're going to focus on just our legs over here, I think. Speaker 1 The question I was thinking was what problem we solving for This is a is a big trend. You can see there are a lot of factors, there are a lot of forces that are moving organisations to consider digital, digital sovereignty. And I'm wondering, have have you ever heard the expression sovereignty washing? Has that ever been used? You know, like in the same way that we talked about greenwashing and other things, Because you know, any, any vendor can try and lean into a particular trend or topic to, to sell more of their products, right, to make themselves more attractive. And I think it's really interesting hearing both of you speak about the fact that the the technology is not necessarily the solution, because you need to have a look at what the technology is, not just what it's enabling, but also how it's operated. I mean, this sound really weird. I never thought I'd live in, in a world where we have to consider Chinese buses, you know, the Yu Tong and BMDS, the Chinese buses to understand, you know, because they're a part of critical national infrastructure, because it's a transport utility. How vulnerable are we to the transport of data, you know, outside of the country that have purchased and operate them back to the, the people who run them? And there's a direct remote link. And there's been all kinds of concerns about that. If we think about Huawei and their telecoms involvement in 5G communications. And you know, there was a EU wide decision that we were just overly exposed to Huawei in the 5G supply chain and they ruled them out. But then it set back 5G implementation by quite a while. So we we're living in a world where things that we never thought would matter are becoming really quite thorny subjects, right of debate. And I guess the the question I have is, is if if you've got so many different forces acting, who is the judge or the arbiter on whether you've actually solved for the problem you need to? And maybe that leads us to the next question, which is, which is why does it matter for governments and therefore, why does it matter for enterprises as well? And Nelson, if I can pass that to you, sure. Speaker 4 Sure. Well, I wanted to bounce back on on Joe Com saying also that you know what, what I have asked to most of the institutions and customers is what do you want to see with software entity? Do you want to actually have control? Do you want to have ownership? And I think that you, you are more or less already knowing where I'm coming ownership when it comes to different software solutions. Infrastructure is good, but it can help. But I think it's not the most important for, for to achieve sovereignty because technology for me does not need to necessarily be European to be sovereign. And of course, this is based on experience, interactions and different projects that I've been involved on. I think the question is who controls what and do you want to have total control? Do you want to have the key of the room, of the apartment, of the house? On technological basis is who holds the encryption keys? When it comes to, I would say institution having as a core activity, national security, European security, Can we, if we go deeper in technology, can we move workloads easily? Can we actually keep operating and decide from one tier to another in between five years and other to, to, to move things to do it differently? Can we audit, can we access what are the obligations that we have by acquiring specific technologies, which law is actually applying? And this is when we have a melting pot of, I would say core professions because it is not the technical people anymore. It's also the regulatory bodies is the law enforcement is the, I would say legal departments working on it. And yeah, I would say that it's, it's it's a difficult question to answer, but the question for me, the main question is what do we want to see? Do we want to have ownership? Do we want to have control? I'm not sure if I totally answered to your questions. I'm not willing to lose track on the question. But this, this is quite, I would say very important when we start exchanging on this topic. And I'm not sure how, how David could see it, but I would be interested to to know, you know, what do you advise? What did you answer when this is answered? Achieving Sovereignty While Driving Business Innovation Yeah, I mean, IA 100% agree with you. The the whole discussion about digital sovereignty is, is not only about how do we become the most sovereign as in how do we become super independent and you know, lock ourselves in and and you know encrypt every data 3 or 4 times and let no one into our house anymore. Sure you'll be super sovereign there, but that's not the goal of the whole thing. I guess the, the actual discussion is more about how do we reach sovereignty goals while still being able to run your organization or while still being able to innovate or, or even just while you're while you try to provide the best possible service for your customers. And that's the actual tricky question because just being sovereign is super easy. Just go back into your data center or even better, go back to like manual, paper based processes and yeah, you'll be super, super sovereign, but you're not going to be sovereign for a long time because you're not going to be able to innovate anymore. So yeah, that's I guess where where the actual challenges within. And my argument would be that in today's age, it's easier than it has been ever before to build sovereign services and to build, you know, your own sovereign infrastructure or to build your own sovereign products here. Because we have the tools, we have the knowledge. There is great partners in the market to help build this this knowledge or help build these tools. You just have to pick and choose the right ones depending on your individual requirements. And I guess that's what we need to discuss and that's what we need to talk about. What are your requirements? Where do you need to navigate to? And as you said, Alex, where to start? Speaker 2 There's always a case of that, that whole, the key point here is working backwards. What's the end goal you're trying to achieve? And then what are the often minimum things that you need to achieve in order to get to that point? Because you don't have to do everything. It can be very easy to look at this whole topic and go, oh, right, I'm going to have to introduce all these controls. I'm going to have all these policies. And then actually if you if you dig into it for the recurrency, your particular organization, it might be actually relatively simple and you have a a very small subset of those controls requirements, etcetera that you want to put in place. Speaker 3 Yeah. Not only is it then relatively simple, it's also that you realize it's not actually a compromise discussion that you're doing. You're actually going to find out that that there is a lot of benefits that you can have when using sovereign products. When you're using sovereign services, especially from like a business or an entrepreneurial perspective, it shouldn't be viewed as a compromise. For example, like a SAS vendor can host a software now in a sovereign environment and therefore get a strategic advantage to other SAS vendors since he can now address customers in a very, let's say regulatory challenging field. So use digital sovereignty, use these tools to create value, to create benefits that will, you know, give you that leap forward. Speaker 2 That's a really interesting point, Jason. And I have talked about this in the past, actually, you know, because digital sovereignty isn't just about Europe, for example. It's about countries all over the world. And imagine that you're a Brazilian developer trying to develop software that's going to be available in all sorts of different countries across the world. How do you make sure that it's going to meet their regulatory requirements? Isn't that right, Jason? Transparency in Digital Sovereignty and Market Competition Yeah, I wanted to maybe use the last thing you said there was meet the requirements. And I want to pick up on that because to me it feels like digital sovereignty is obviously, you know, the actual problem we're solving for is depending on whose viewpoint you're looking from. And we've got regulators, they don't tend to have such a flexible view on what's needed, but there's, there's other stakeholders out there. So I guess what I'm asking, or thinking anyway, is. Speaker 4 How? Speaker 1 Do we help a company make sure that they can pass the test? Because, you know, if it's a regular regulatory requirement, it should be well enough to find you can tell if you've met it or not. And I know that sometimes when they're announced, there's a grace period where people are trying to work out exactly what will stick. And then the people who will audit are trying to work out what the, what the kind of nuances are, what the margins are. And then you get to a point where everyone kind of has an agreement and, you know, whether you pass the test or not. But it feels to me like there's so many forces acting. How do we help people understand and whether they are going to pass the test? You guys are both involved in working with companies from what I can understand to really help them get that confidence. So maybe if we look at it first from Nelson, your point of view in terms of the frameworks and ultimately who those wider stakeholders are and what they need. And then, David, maybe how you're helping people do it through the kind of evidencing it on a technology perspective. Does that work as a question? Speaker 4 Sure, sure. I, I think that I, I, I always ask 2 questions to the institutions and I have worked in the corporate vault as well. So I think that what I keep in mind is that what is the main mission that you have as, as, as AEU body or as a company, right. And I think that the, the main objective mission they have is innovation. And we are also the one speaking all the time, optimised to innovate. And the first thing I said to the institution to to help them is OK. Do you want to build a world around your organization that you know nothing evolved but nothing will advance? Should I be able to give you advices and my perspective on, on being placed in the interaction between the, the, the corporate world, the technologies and then, you know, providing advices and services to you? And of course, it all depends to whom you are talking. Most of politicians, also civil servants would say that yeah, absolutely not. It is not the goal to, to, to be a wall circle around the continent organization that sovereignty should basically mean something else to, to have more, more independence. But at the end it, it means resilience. So everyone needs resilience either in business or or I would say continued business continuity for the institutions. The goal will remain innovation, of course. And then how I actually help them is to really map out what do you want to achieve, how do you want to tackle it and how flexible would you be within the regulations because regulations are there to guide, not to impose. But then if I go to the second question that I always ask them is, OK, how do they use the regulations? I will not change today. One of those would be procurement regulations because we're very focused on different tech regulations today. I think that we have, I mean, if I count with my hands, we might have 89 and and every every single month we have some new regulation act and so on. So I asked them, OK, how do we really can increase competitiveness among the vendors, among the technologies because there are regulations for competitiveness. But I think that the real competitiveness is to give the opportunity to different kind of technological players to shortcase our capabilities. And this is actually what I love to, to do and this is what I enjoy the most working at software one, because we have access to so many technologies that are very good on what they're doing that, OK, how do we increase that competitive increase? Sorry, that competitiveness, how do I make sure that you will understand, of course, I'm not aiming to shortcase 50 of them or or 100 if possible, Yes, but to do my best to introduce you 1235 solutions and that you evaluate by yourself on capabilities, on outcome and of course, trying to combine that with the regulation itself because we cannot overpass that. And I think that at the end, how do we help them? If I want to be very pragmatic and in one word, it's with transparency, I would be very transparent in between what they want to achieve and what is really possible. Working at institutions means that you really need to follow all these, I would say agendas, rules. And I understand if I was, you know, on that side 100%, I would understand that there's something to follow up and that's the agenda and and the rules above our head. But I am very transparent on what that's implied. So I'm trying to keep balance. It is not always possible, but I try to be transparent in what is realistic in the market and what is needed for what they want to receive. Key Factors for Successful Digital Sovereignty Implementation You make a really interesting point though, that I hadn't even considered that, you know, we've been talking about digital sovereignty from a customer and end an end organization's perspective predominantly. But actually digital sovereignty is a is an opportunity for innovation and the organizations that supply them as well. And bringing in digital sovereignty regulation and trying to drive for a broader set of options, if you will, for organizations actually that could be really positive for competition globally and for different countries to really be pushing their own, you know, innovation forward for other organizations and other countries to to take advantage of. What do you think, David? Speaker 3 Yeah. I wanted to get back to, to both Jason's question and also add two more points to to Nelson's answer here. Because at least what I can see from from all the customer cases I've been working in, in the last couple of years there for me at least are just mainly 2 factors that, that lead to success here. Number one would be make it measurable where you can. So try to use established frameworks to measure your actions, to measure your IT stack, your vendor selection, your processes, your, your, your operating model. So because only if you can measure your actions, you can actually see how successful they will be in the end. And only by measuring them, you will be able to navigate and see, OK, this action may not have worked or given the results that we were expecting and maybe something else will work even better. And there are tools and there are frameworks that that you can use here that are established in the market, I would say. But also, maybe you can use those tools if they don't fit your use case 100% and adapt that and just use it as a general guidance and make sure it makes more sense for your individual business here. So that's tip #1 make it as measurable as you can. The second tip bits is the whole thing, as always in in large transformation projects, it's a people's business and in every organization, not always everyone is a team player. Yeah, you're laughing, Alex, because I think we all know that everyone who's been, you know, in contact with these large transformation projects knows different stakeholders have different kind of interests, different motivations. A product owner has totally contrary requirements to ACFO or a security officer. And the the only way to get to success is to find common ground. And this needs to be done very, very early. When defining your sovereignty strategy, involve the people that are affected by it. Get everyone in the same boat. Here are their requirements, here are their thoughts. And make sure you, you know, get them from the very beginning on this journey because if you try to collect them after you already started, you're going to have difficult time. Nelson, any thoughts on on that? Yeah, no. Speaker 4 Totally. I do agree with you completely. I think that's the to to establish criteria is to measure how successful sovereignity is going on. When I, when I mentioned transparencies also we need to understand that implementation is difficult, so everyone needs to be aware of that. For me, it is important that the people I am in relation with the customers or any other vendors, they understand that yeah, you need to keep a balance between sovereignty, security, regulation, budget, existing systems, interoperability, essential services. So each kind of segment has measures to be established. And once each segment established that then of course the transformation transformation start happening. Transformation cannot of course, happen overnight. This is, I'm not even going to the gym every day allows you to transform in a very short time. So it's, it's really important to to to keep, you know, to keep the reality on. And then of course, in my case, I think that I tried to understand how to translate the political ambition into the solvable entity transformation into the into the practical procurement criteria. How would be the transition between the security solution A to security solution B and the the measurable as you said, operational outcome? So there are so many, I think measures and to measure that to tackle it, to neglect, but there are so many elements that need to have a list of, you know, measurable outcomes and, and there is, is what they we need to keep in mind for, for the customers and the customers itself, of course. Smart Workload Placement and Scenario Protection in Sovereignty I think you've, you've hit on something that I've been saying for many, many, many years. I didn't coin the phrase measure twice, cut once. So if we, if we have a good understanding of our baseline and then we start to make these changes, then we can actually, you know, realistically measure how far we've come and be able to demonstrate, you know, using what David was talking about earlier on, be able to actually demonstrate to auditors or to whomever else. OK, these are the steps we've taken towards these outcomes that we were looking for and that we've agreed up front. So I wanted to kind of take this a little bit more down the, I guess the practical route. I'm, I'm curious from your perspective, how do we start to take these concepts that we've been talking about and the measuring and so forth and then we start to actually drive these into an actual digital strategy solution. So for example, I mean, if I just pull something out of the air, I, one of the organisations we're working with at the moment is as a very early adopter of the European sovereign clouds in AWS. And that particular organization has lots of different workloads, right? Maybe, you know, hundreds of different workloads. And we don't need the same level of requirements against everything. So we don't need to take every single workload and drop it into European sovereign cloud, which actually has a, you know, a bit of an additional cost associated with doing that. With that organization, we're actually going workload by workload and having a smart placement rule, if you will, as to does this go into a sovereign cloud or does this go into a commercial cloud? What are the kind of conversations that you're having, David, practically with customers to help to guide them through these really complex decisions they're going to make? Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, I guess it all starts again with with the topic of of sovereign strategy. You need to define what is sovereign for you and how sovereign you want to be. And the results of of these actions should be some kind of a, a matrix which you can then use to classify each and every workload that you're operating with. Now a large organization has of course, hundreds or even thousands of workloads. And this might be a little bit overwhelming and beginning to think, OK, we now need to spend till next. I know 10 years go through each and every workload, each and every database, each and every technology stack and each product area. No, this, this is not the way to go step by step. So try to think about what is your core business, What is the core processes that you want to work on that you want to transform and use these as as your, your first targets. So come up with with the evaluation metrics for sovereignty, which will follow your digital sovereignty strategy. Take a look into what are your core businesses, what is your core processes and start, start with these. Because with with these, you will only be able then to see actual results only if you work on the processes that are involved in your business. You'll be able to measure actual results if you just work on workloads and applications that are not really in the core of your business. And you know, just like a nice to have. Sure, it's easy to say that you're super sovereign now, but if it doesn't apply to your actual business you're running, you've not really brought any any value to your own organization. So that's that would be my two cents on on how to start this whole journey. Speaker 2 That's a great show, Nelson. Speaker 4 Well, I, I was actually wanted to ask something to David, would those word load, let's assume that we have already on a strategy and that I'm a customer. I think that the challenge that I have perceived is that they have 1000 of word loads. Let's assume that I don't know 700 are part of the core business. It's still a lot. It's still to do it. It's still a lot to do in no time. From your knowledge on professional basis would a typical customer or or organization have this word loads more on an European, I would say solution or a non European solution because this is where the complexity arise, right. We, we if I was a customer are are telling me, OK, we want to we need to do all, all of them once out then OK, because the business is just focused on that. But how do you tackle that then? Because if it's not possible or if it's possible, then of course it is. But how did you give confidence to to to the customers on on those on those spaces? Yeah. Speaker 3 I guess 1 great action to do is to think about what are the scenarios you want to protect yourself against. Is it the scenario of from one day to another, all cables leading to the US are cut and there's no data exchange anymore? This is a kind of a a horrific scenario and it's going to be very tricky to find a solution for that or find a Plan B on navigating in a digital world completely isolated from from the United States. Are you working against the scenario of having an audit that is something much more tangible and something much more easy to plan forward to? Is it the scenario such as the Cloud Act, for example, where you are afraid of having your data that is maybe located in one of the hyperscaler clouds or one of the cloud providers of the US being being accessed? Or is it you want to protect your your core IPS? If, if that's the scenario, maybe it does also make sense to consider the hyperscaler clouds as your target platform, but have, for example, an external key management running there. Because then of course, yes, the the US with the Cloud Act might be able to access that data. But if it's encrypted and you're the only one holding the key, your IP at least is still protected. So think about the kind of scenarios that that might happen. Think about the scenarios that you want to protect yourself against and use that as the as your guiding point to lead your actions towards. Combining Forces and the Future of European Technology Would you then say that in, in, in reality, when it comes to no matter which field today, public or private, the answer is to combine forces, to combine forces between, you know, US technology, European technology personally, I, you know, on the interactions I have not only with the professionals, IT like like 2 guys or also politicians or civil servant. They do understand that it is important to be European, not only as a citizen as we are, but it is important to have capabilities, technology resiliency and evolution and, and, and innovation. But the reality is I've been told as well that it is important to keep in touch in collaboration in in combination of forces with, you know, non European technology because of course we have to state American, but it can be any other that are not European. So would you maybe today the question is not should we have a ratio of 5050? Should we have 3070? That's not the question on the table from me, at least at the moment, but it is combining forces and then a solution for you. Speaker 3 Absolutely, yeah. And and one of the typical results that we see in customers where we're working with the evaluation metrics is that we find that for each workload for the the the process or the unit that that we're looking at each workload benefits from a different kind of infrastructure or platform. And there might be workloads that benefit from a hyper scaler platform from the scalability and from the performance and the maybe even the security there, while other workloads that maybe handle sensitive data profit more from a private cloud environment or a European cloud environment or even an on premise environment. So for each and every workload and each and each process that we're looking at, the results usually are not everything to hyperscaler, everything to European cloud, everything to on premise. It's usually much more, much more complex, but also much more beneficial to the actual value that you're trying to provide as an organization. So yes, absolutely it's going to be a hybrid. That's the the usual target scenario that we see in customers, either hyperscaler plus on premise or hyperscaler plus European cloud provider or European cloud provider plus on premise. Speaker 4 And then from from my end at least just because I'm conscious of the time and speed is one of the core values of of software wine. What would so collaboration is key, combined forces key then who actually from your experience today innovates faster and would be realistic to believe that we will in 51015 years have much more, I would say European solutions, strategies or being more sovereign, even if it's this is not what sovereign means, but it's just a kind of a way to talk from your perspective who goes faster and it is realistic to believe that we will be more and more European in terms of racial in the future or not? Speaker 3 So who goes faster from a customer perspective? I think the usual answer that anyone would think of as the one that has the most pressure. But then again, usually it would, you would assume that the public sector would have the most pressure and they would move the quickest, but that's at least not what I can see. So at least from from my interactions with the customers, the customers that move the fastest are the small and medium businesses that hesitated to move towards cloud in the last 10 years. But now see the innovation within the European cloud providers and see that now they have new vendors and new solution providers that they can pull from and now start to innovate. And these customers are usually very quick to act. Decisions are made fairly quickly and just due to the the size of the organization, they are able to move faster than the large corporations or the public sector. Speaker 4 Well, I was actually meaning to and I will give you my own statement that's new technologies often innovate faster than non new technologies. From, from my, I think personal experience background, but also professional, I think that some non European companies, particularly of course American companies scale and innovate faster. It doesn't mean that Europe lacks of, of innovation at all. We in Europe and as Europeans will have excellent research, cybersecurity, industrial innovation, technology and software companies. I think the challenge is converting innovation into tangible companies that kind of you know scale across Europe and in the European market. There is an event I attended with the EU officials. As I mentioned before there it is good to have innovation, but imagine to adapt to 27 different kind of regulations and, and, and, and, and rules. And then to the question back on, do you think that in the future in 5-10 years are we going to have more, it is going to be, it is realistic to say that we will replace hyperscaler or not more on the technical basis and capabilities? Speaker 3 OK. Thank you Nelson for elaborating on that. On that question again, I I guess now I get it. So from a technical or technology perspective on innovation, I think the the fastest innovation we've seen in the last decade or so was where the biggest demand was. And the biggest demand of course was for the hyperscaler cloud and the US providers there. And I think the demand side now changes in at least in the European market where European providers and European technology is getting more and more attention. So I think it only makes sense to assume that now the innovation for these providers also speeds up quite rapidly. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see where we will be in the next year or two or five years because I think we will have already today a very competitive products and in five years even more interesting what will be then? I hope that that answers your question. Speaker 4 Totally. Thank you for that. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's interesting to think how the, how the shape of the market is going to change. I mean, I, I, when I think about markets, sometimes I feel like market distortion can be a bad thing. But, you know, US tech companies have had almost some restricted access to the EU market for so long. It feels like it's a bit of a balancing of the playing field. And certainly if you want companies to, you know, really adopt digital sovereignty around the EU space, you've got to have viable options for them, right? So you've got to create the market where those options can not just grow, but where they can thrive. Because when we talk about resilience, we talk about continuity. Those are stable businesses. You can't just be bringing startups to, you know, trust. Well, let me rephrase that. You wouldn't bring a startup to to manage everything for an enterprise business. An enterprise business wouldn't make that step. And actually from a risk point of view, it wouldn't make sense to make that step. So you've got to have some maturity in the market as well. So we shall see what that looks like in the future. Final Thoughts and Practical Advice from the Experts We love to give the audience takeaways. So what I'd like you to think about now, David and Nelson, is what's your 1 take away for the audience? We've talked about a lot. It's clearly quite a broad topic. It's a very turbulent topic, let's say. It's quite a fragmented, fragmented area of discussion. So this has been great to help us narrow it down in terms of what actually matters. But maybe I could put you on the spot for one take away for the audience if I come to you first, Nelson. Speaker 4 I would say that the yeah, research and innovation in sovereignty will remain a constant topic in evolution. This will change every month, every day, every year. We, we often get tired of, you know, updating regulations. And I'm, I'm keeping the, the regulation as a, as a word because this is a message I give to customers, to politicians, and also to some friends and you know, colleagues like you. In order to succeed on sovereignty and on research and innovation in technology, we need to have governments who has less regulations, openness on market and transparency, less burden will support us to evolve in our core activities, either private or corporate sector. So that would be my main message and take away. And this of course will take a little bit of time. So we cannot rush into a final solution. And then, yeah, I'm really excited to to see understand how these will keep evolving day after day and week after week. Speaker 1 Brilliant. Thank you. And David, what's your take away for the audience? Speaker 3 So my take away would be be careful of anyone who promises you the simple solution for this very complex issue or challenge. Building sovereign services has never been easier than it is today and there's really no need to to wait for anything else to happen or to change. But it needs to be done carefully and acquires. It requires a lot of experience. So be careful with your vendor selection, be careful with your strategic partner selection, and try not to go the easy way because there really is no easy way. Speaker 2 Fantastic advice, gentlemen. How to Connect with Guests and Further Resources Thank you very much for joining us. Before we wrap up, then just a last one. So where can people stock you online if they wanted to, to reach out? And also is there anything that you would recommend if people want to learn a little bit more? What would you recommend? David, I'll come to you. Speaker 3 If you want to get in touch with me, I, I, I think the best way to do it is via mail. Just type in [email protected] and I'll make sure to respond to you quite rapidly. Also if you're interested in the topic, I would like to also advertise here at my very own interview series that I'm doing in the German market here also in the German language in which I have the pleasure to speak to. Yeah, I think some of the key vendors within the European market such as IONOS, AWS, European Sovereign Cloud, Delos, Phoenix Cloud in Switzerland and so on. These are 10 to 15 minute long interviews. It's called Sovereign Voices. And I guess if you are following softer one channels, you will find also these interviews coming soon. Speaker 2 Fantastic. Thank you, David. That sounds really interesting. And Nelson? Speaker 4 I am more than happy to be reached over LinkedIn, so you will find me under my name Nelson Hereda. And yeah, if I am rich, I will do my outmost to to answer you with regards all the advices. I think there are millions of books and and and also podcasts and things that as we are doing today, I will start where I started and what I keep doing is following people. So I will recommend to follow different perspective from people who are shaping the regulation today. One of them, of course is the VP of Sovereignty, Hena Recruiting and her team. Then you have Katarina Saharva who is in charge of the European Commission for Research and Innovation. And then I will highly recommend Diego Solier, who is a member of European Parliament working on sovereignity, but also in the cloud and AI and development. I would recommend to follow them to see which angles they they have today and then of course to build on your own understanding. Speaker 2 Fantastic advice and yeah, some excellent sources. What we'll do is we'll make sure that we post links to those people into the show notes to make it nice and easy for people to find them. And with that, we're going to wrap it up. So once again, thank you very much for joining us, David and Nelson, super insightful. Jason, a pleasure as always. And thank you everybody who's tuned in to listen to this episode with us. If you did enjoy the episode, please do hit subscribe on your podcast app. Leave us a little review. Honestly, it really helps more people to find us. And if there's something you'd love us to cover in the future, just don't hesitate to leave a comment or let us know via socials. So we're at Software one just about everywhere. And you can even e-mail us at otwoisoftwareone.com. So that's Othenumber 2 isoftwareone.com. And with that, thank you very much for listening and we'll see you in the next one.