Seven Dutch Cloud Companies Unite to Challenge Big Tech

A new alliance of Dutch IT firms is betting that European digital sovereignty can move from political talking point to operational reality — starting with government procurement.

On 1 April 2026, seven Dutch IT companies announced they would begin working together under the name Open Cloud Alliance. The participating firms — Centric, KPN, Info Support, Intermax, Nebul, Previder, and Uniserver — collectively generate around €2.5 billion in annual cloud revenue. Together, they want to offer a credible, locally governed alternative to the large American cloud providers that currently dominate the Dutch public sector market.

The announcement was first reported by NRC (Marloes de Koning, 1 April 2026).

Why Now?

The timing is not coincidental. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the conversation about digital sovereignty has intensified across Europe. The political appetite to reduce dependence on American technology platforms is real — but in practice, governments and enterprises have been slow to act. They fear service disruptions when switching to smaller providers, and they are often deterred by the technical complexity of migration.

Meanwhile, Dutch dependence on US tech is actually growing, driven in part by the rapid adoption of AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT — both delivered by American companies.

A sharper recent trigger: the potential acquisition of Solvinity — the company that runs the DigiD application for the Dutch government — by American firm Kyndryl. Whether the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs will approve the deal remains unclear at the time of writing, but the prospect alone has made the stakes of digital dependency concrete and visible.

What the Alliance Actually Proposes

The seven companies have agreed to:

Adopt shared technical standards, making it easier for customers to move data between providers and to combine services across the alliance

Guarantee continuity: if one partner is acquired by a non-European party, the others will step in to ensure data remains under Dutch control

Stay competitors on price — there are no pricing agreements; each company bids independently for contracts

Open the alliance to other European companies willing to commit to the same standards

The initiative was launched by Maarten Hillenaar (Centric) and Ludo Baauw (CEO, Intermax Group). Baauw summarised the philosophy plainly: “I’d rather a Dutch competitor wins than an American Big Tech firm.”

The Market Opportunity: Government Procurement

The alliance’s agreements are primarily aimed at convincing Dutch government bodies to award more contracts domestically. Government IT contracts tend to be large and span many different applications — which is exactly why they typically go to the biggest providers, who benefit from economies of scale. Tax money consequently flows abroad, and technical expertise accumulates outside the Netherlands.

The companies lay out their economic argument in a joint manifesto, presented to politicians in The Hague: “We create jobs in the Netherlands. Our companies and employees pay taxes here. Money keeps circulating in our own economy. That is not a cost. That is an investment.”

The Dutch competition authority ACM responded positively in an initial reaction. Chairman Martijn Snoep noted that collaborations of this kind can actually promote market competition by enabling new players to better challenge dominant American providers — though he emphasised he had not yet reviewed the specific agreements in detail.

Technical Feasibility: Easier Than You Think

According to Baauw, the technical challenges are less daunting than they appear. The seven companies already share a large common foundation: most of them use the same open source software under the hood. Physical distances between Dutch data centres are small. As Baauw put it with some irony: “We sometimes joke that all we need to do is hang a rope over the fence.”

The legal side is more complex. The companies are also competitors, which creates thorny questions — can you guarantee the same service levels to a customer hosted in a partner’s data centre? Cybersecurity agreements also need to be contractualised carefully.

Crucially, the alliance does not aim to build a so-called hyperscaler — a full-stack data centre and application platform equivalent to what Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud provide. That is simply not feasible, even with more European companies joining. What they can do, they argue, is build bespoke applications on top of this shared infrastructure where demand exists.

Broader Context: A Federated European Cloud

This initiative fits into a larger European effort to interconnect small IT providers into a coherent, federated cloud model. Research programmes involving TNO (the Dutch applied sciences institute), AMS-IX (the Amsterdam internet exchange), and Leaseweb have been exploring exactly this kind of architecture for several years. The Open Cloud Alliance is, in a sense, a live pilot case for applying those findings.

Also in the frame: a pan-European effort to build an open source ‘Euro-office’ suite — a genuinely European alternative to Microsoft 365. Participating companies include Dutch email provider Soverin, German cloud provider IONOS, and NextCloud (which already offers a fairly complete MS365 alternative but lacks email). Around thirty developers across the partner companies are being committed to accelerate this.

At national level, the Netherlands has a digitalisation strategy and plans for a ‘Rijkscloud’ (national government cloud), but no budget has yet been allocated to it. Technical standards developed by the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG) to make switching between providers easier are also still far from universally adopted.

My Take

I work in digital marketing, and I’ve spent the past year migrating my organisation’s analytics from Google Analytics 4 to Piwik PRO — a European alternative. The process taught me something important: the barrier to European alternatives is rarely technical. It is institutional inertia, procurement habit, and a collective failure to factor data sovereignty into the cost model.

The Open Cloud Alliance doesn’t solve all of that overnight. But it does something important: it reframes the conversation. Instead of asking “can a Dutch company match AWS?” (they can’t, not yet), it asks “can Dutch companies together handle serious public sector workloads under Dutch law, with data continuity guarantees?” That answer, increasingly, is yes.

I’ll be watching closely for the first concrete deployments. The direction is right. The momentum is building.

Source: NRC, “Zeven Nederlandse cloudbedrijven bundelen krachten en komen met alternatief voor Amerikaanse techreuzen”, Marloes de Koning, 1 april 2026.