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Nov 29,2022 No comments yet By Origo

We’re retiring Northcloud

The Northcloud project did not receive funding from Innovation Fund Denmark. As a consequence we’re retiring the project and the Northcloud brand. Existing accounts have been migrated to origo.io.

Digital infrastructure in Denmark (and the rest of Europe) is largely split between an enterprise sector with hundreds of small data centers run by local sysadmins using off-the-shelf software and hardware, and a cloud sector with highly efficient data centers, run by a handful of foreign tech giants using proprietary software and hardware.

Northcloud’s mission was simple: To unite local IT industry and the public sector behind the goal of combining many small units into a few larger infrastructure units, running as efficiently and profitably as the cloud sector, revitalizing local tech industry in the process, eventually producing zero-emission data centers, ARM-based servers and new service offerings.

The core innovations of Northcloud were:

  • a novel business model for digital infrastructure; it would be jointly owned by the local IT industry and the Danish state, both with vested interests in critical, digital infrastructure (profits, innovation, tech resilience).
  • a proven and open source technology stack, combining advanced service packaging and delivery, with innovative and scalable hardware orchestration.

We learned that the enterprise operations market is shaped by IT departments who naturally prioritize the daily workings of their own, local organization, over combined, national efficiency; whereas the cloud / developer market is shaped by incumbents with almost infinite lobbying and marketing budgets.

Without seed capital, sufficient industry interest and some sort of official approval, a project like this cannot succeed – the barriers to entry into the market are simply too high. We tried, and we will probably try again eventually.

For now, a big thank you to the organizations who actually did try out our offerings, and to the vendors who expressed interest in a joint Danish cloud adventure!

To the powers that be at Kombit, Digitaliseringsstyrelsen, KL and DI Digital – we’re here!

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