The Cloud Operations Market
The cloud operations market continues to increase its importance for Trifork and our customers. Cloud is becoming the new norm across our markets as a ‘deployment model’ for both applications and infrastructure.
Cloud-based architecture gives developers greater flexibility and efficiency in DevOps and better accessibility to users. The cloud operations market continues to be dominated by large American ‘hyper- scalers’ who set the standard for many of the services and price levels in the market.
But at the same time, we also observe that organizations are increasingly prioritizing privacy concerns as a result of EU regulations. They want to know who controls the assets, where the applications are hosted, and how their data is stored. This makes private cloud providers relevant in the market.
Cloud operations are becoming increasingly business-critical while the required technical capabilities are becoming more complex. At the same time, the regulatory landscape is constantly evolving. This drives demand for solutions that are secure, flexible, and capable of being migrated from local storage to private or public cloud, and vice versa.
The development of new cloud applications exceeds the capabilities of most in-house IT departments. The introduction of multiple cloud environments drives the increasing need for external service providers.
Our Cloud Operations Business
At Trifork, our ambition in cloud operations remains to improve the work of developers in our customers’ organizations. Our services range from advising and designing infrastructure solutions to implementing and maintaining complete cloud-based solutions that suit each organization.
Our product offering spans from on-premis- es data storage to multi- and hybrid-cloud solutions as well as public cloud platforms from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. We often develop solutions that are agnostic between cloud environments, ensuring a high degree of flexibility for our customers.
In 2023, Trifork Cloud Operations revenue grew by 14.1% to EURm 34.1, largely driven by our subsidiary company Netic. We continued our efforts to expand our offering throughout the year.
Cloud Native is the business area that has attracted the most attention and the area where we have experienced the most significant and increasing demand for our services, primarily because of our Cloud Stack. Our in-house developed application platform called Contain has gained strong traction. It is based on Kubernetes and designed to provide a comprehensive and secure infrastructure. Our hosting business also performed well in 2023.
We participated in events to a greater extent than ever before. Just to name a few: DevOpsDays in Copenhagen, GOTO in Aarhus, and the new KCD Denmark, which with 400 attendees, was a resounding success.
An increasing number of customers who work with Trifork on developing new software decide to enter into operations agreements. We consider this an important part of our overall growth strategy. One such example is the Kamstrup customer case on pages 38 and 45 in the annual report, where our Smart Building and IoT teams developed a data platform, which is now operated and fully managed in Contain. Further, when Cloud Operations grows, it contributes to increased stability in the Group’s revenues due to the long-term nature of customer contracts.
The margins in Cloud Operations were satisfactory in 2023; a year that saw fewer physical investments than in 2022. Having physical assets allows for operational leverage when the utilization of our modern data centers increases.
