Keeping your entrepreneurial spirit through an acquisition đ
How Omny Cloud will continue to impact the world of cloud computingâŠ
Felix and Augustin are the cofounders of Omny Cloud, a cloud computing solution. After recently getting acquired by Go2Cloud, Felix is sharing with us the highlights of the past couple of years.
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Hello Felix, thank you for taking the time to chat.
Can you first tell us a bit about your story? What was the start of your journey?
I was a 3rd-year student in a French business school (ESSEC) when we launched Omny Cloud, in Jan. 2019. At that time, I was also starting an apprenticeship in strategic marketing at Arkema, and managed 2 associations as President and Vice-President (JAM and Enactus ESSEC).
With Omny Cloud, Augustin and I wanted to deep dive into the B2B tech market with an innovative solution to replace traditional computers. As we stayed aware of the latest tech trends, the Cloud PC started to spread in the US, and we saw an opportunity for the European market. Plus: it is a product I wanted to have and use on a day-to-day basis as my personal computer, to always have it by my side, safe. Â
Augustin was doing research in machine learning at Tokyo University, as part of his computer science degree at INSA Lyon. He has always been my closest relative and, during a trip to meet him there, we agreed it would be our first venture. He started to work on the MVP immediately, while I started interviewing tens of target companies to understand their needs.
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Can you tell us more about your history with Augustin? You didnât really decide to start working together on a whimâŠ
Augustin and I are cousins, with the same age. We grew up together, always looking for the latest tech innovation, from robotics to AI and Cloud Computing.
We launched several projects together before Omny Cloud, including a Rock Band, a haptic smart glass project, and a music composing duo (electronic and short films soundtracks).
We want to choose our own direction with projects we believe in, while following what we think will be the future market.
At Omny Cloud, Augustin designed the whole product before the first employees joined to help him. He is a software engineer, with a strong tech credibility and vision, and he took the lead as CEO and product owner.
I learned to manage the sales, communication and finance for the entire project.
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What is the core of the product that the two of you developed?
Omny Cloud virtual desktops enables any employee to access their Windows workspace from any device and anywhere, without any computing power limitations. Our customer can truly implement flex and smart offices, with even the most powerful desktops at hand (on smart screens and lobby tablets, for example).
It brings mobility and flexibility, without increasing costs nor leaving data on access points that could threaten the IT system.
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Cloud computing has been around for some time now, what use cases did you choose to target?
Existing virtual desktops solutions are mainly targeting enterprise-size companies, low computing power and specific IT skills. They are also hard to implement and time-consuming to manage. The technologies come from the 90s and are not optimized for heavy work like graphic / 3D, and remote work with low bandwidth.
Thatâs why we rebuilt Cloud Desktops with proprietary technologies, aiming at the simplest service. It is plugân play, and more affordable and optimized for high performance than any competitors. We designed our servers with hardware manufacturers to bring the perfect computing power and limit the opex and cooling needs. Lastly, we designed our platform to be multi-cloud, for customers to deploy a safe and trustable environment, either on Omny Cloud or on another providerâs.
Our unique selling points: high performance (GPU) specialization, simplicity of use, lower compute costs, multi-cloud by design.
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After starting with only the two of you, who were the key talents that you integrated to the team?
Here are the most important people to our development:
Mario Campos: he is the first full-time employee of Omny Cloud, and became the lead developer of the product.
Bertrand Micheau: he joined Omny Cloud as an advisor in 2020 and Managing Partner in 2021. His experience as a Partner and Sales Director at AZEO was a perfect fit to manage partnerships, key accounts and recruitments.
Frederic Aymé: after years of consulting at Accenture, he joined as the pre-sales lead to do the bridge between sales and tech.
The rest of the team is made of developer for the various layers of the product.
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Can you tell us what kind of impact the COVID crisis had on your business?
We started 1 year before the Covid crisis, with a solution designed to improve and secure remote work for all employees or engineers, with powerful workstations included.
The crisis put forward our technology as a long-term solution for more IT agility in small companies, but it also pushed them to use bigger, more established offers despite their high prices and worse user experience.
We could expand our message, sign deals with big customers like Université Paris Nanterre and Bouygues Construction, but it also increased the need to reassure our target SMBs on Cloud security.
Last but not least, the crisis came with a global and unprecedented component shortage, which is still ongoing. It has been almost impossible to buy new components for our servers (good GPUs), and thus increase our customer base.
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We know that selling the company was not your initial plan, can you tell us how you came to that decision?
After a successful launch in 2020 and a growing user base, we planned to raise our Seed round in early 2021.
Despite having signed a 2M⏠fundraising term sheet with well-known VCs in France, external elements like the component crisis, a similar company going bankrupt (Shadow), and news of a new competitor (Microsoft) motivated a change in the strategy. Getting closer to an industrial who could manage the servers and supply, while supporting our expansion in new regions, became crucial. The pivot to a software-only company seemed promising.
At that time, we had received 3 purchase offers for Omny Cloud (including one from our Business Angels). One of them, from a German Cloud provider, was very interesting and made sense given the situation. Their reach in the Middle East, multiple data centres in Europe and expertise in high-performance computing were strategic for us.
After 4 months of negotiations, we finally sold Omny Cloud to them in September 2021, with the whole team onboard!
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In hindsight, what are the biggest lessons that will stick from your entrepreneurial journey?
It is WAY easier when you are your own user. As soon as I started to use our product on a daily basis as both my work and personal computers, a lot of improvements came to our minds.
Also, nothing goes as planned, and we usually underestimate our dependencies to tech giants (Microsoft, hardware suppliers). If the risks are not assessed correctly, it becomes harder to pivot when needed.
Another lesson is, similar to the well-known technical debt, what I can call a ârelationship debtâ. In our case as family cofounders. It is very tempting but a bad idea to disregard the otherâs annoying actions or an unbalanced situation for the sake of the relationship. It will ultimately blow up, typically at the time of a crisis⊠Always work for a balanced situation with a fully open communication.
Lastly, nothing is over when the team remains. We managed to do a U-turn in the middle of the pandemic to sell the company at very good terms thanks to our teamâs resilience.
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And now, whatâs next?
We want to see Omny Cloud deployed across Europe in the Middle East, and for that go on working at full-speed with the buyer.
We have been convinced by entrepreneurship as the most fulfilling experience and way of life, and will never stop trying to launch new projects in tech.Â
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Thank you!