We’ve talked with Ditlev Bredahl, OnApp founder and CEO, during VMworld 2015 in Barcelona. This is what he told us.

Tell us about how the OnApp adventure began.

I founded OnApp in 2010. Before 2010, I was personally managing a Service Provider, i was providing several companies with hosting services and I decide to sell mine and dedicate to a new project. As Amazon Web Service continued to grow, I wanted to realise something that could compete with such colossus. No small cloud provider can compete with Amazon: it cannot provide the same global coverage, it’s not able to build an infrastructure that scales the same way and it can’t include in the offer all the services that Amazon proposes.

OnApp is a revolutionary service because it allows all the Service Provider of this world to ally creating a sort of federation, making a competition with Amazon possible.

So is OnApp coverage equal to Amazon’s?

Even more: our network is composed of 3.000 Service Providers spread across 93 countries. We have a complete set of features: automated management, cloud services orchestration and provisioning, dedicated servers, VPS, CDN, DNS and storage. All of that by means of a single handy interface.

Is that an advantage for your clients and for Cloud Providers?

Sure: clients have a new competitor that now has everything to compete with giants like Amazon. But it’s really an advantage for Cloud Providers that now have another card in their deck to be more competitive and scalable on a global perspective.

Even though the structure is so extended and heterogeneous, can OnApp maintain a satisfying service level?

Yes, sure. All our offer have SLAs and for those who look for more advanced solutions, we are part of vCloud Air Network, the network of certified providers that use vCloud Air.