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When Vinay Joosery cofounded Several9s in 2011, the cloud market was already tilting heavily toward the United States – at least that was the way European enterprises perceived it. The Sweden-headquartered company, which operates remotely across Europe, set out to automate and simplify database operations, but the team was also focused on something broader: the geopolitical implications of where data lives and who ultimately controls it.
“We started talking about European distrust – let’s say data security – just as Amazon started growing,” Joosery recalls. Even in 2011, he says, enterprises were uneasy about placing sensitive information in US-controlled infrastructure.
More than a decade later, Joosery argues that this early concern has hardened into a structural challenge for Europe. He points to industry analyses that show US hyperscalers expanding rapidly in the region over the past decade. While the exact figures vary by study, the trendline is consistent: American cloud providers dominate European cloud revenues, and local providers have struggled to keep pace.
“The cloud industry in Europe has lost a lot of ground over the last few years,” he says, “and to take it back will take at least 10 years, because we need to build the solutions.”
For Joosery, sovereignty concerns are most visible in the database layer, the foundation of every digital service. Modern enterprises run hundreds or even thousands of database instances across on-premises systems, hyperscalers and national cloud providers. But the fragmentation of platforms, licensing models and data‑handling rules creates operational and legal complexity.
“How do you make it easy to manage the database across multiple platforms, when you cannot use the same methods?” he asks. Each cloud provider uses its own concepts, architectures and tooling. “There is no real multi-cloud when you’re using the database as a service, because the database service is specific to the cloud vendor.” The result, he says, is a form of lock-in that is no longer just technical; it is geopolitical.
Joosery points to recent examples where organisations have faced access restrictions due to jurisdictional conflicts or sanctions. While details vary, the underlying issue is consistent in his view: control follows jurisdiction. “If the data is stored with a US cloud provider, even if the servers are in Europe, the jurisdiction is not necessarily Europe,” he says, referencing long-running concerns about the extraterritorial reach of the US CLOUD Act.
This, he adds, should be a wake-up call for European organisations, but “companies are lazy… they will do the minimum to satisfy compliance.”
A case for a different model, and a new ‘Act Three.’
Joosery frames the evolution of database services in three acts:
- Act 1: Hyperscalers introduce DBaaS – fast, convenient, but deeply proprietary.
- Act 2: Database vendors follow with their own managed services – reducing cloud lock-in but creating new vendor lock-in.
- Act 3: Intelligent, vendor-neutral platforms that let organisations roll their own DBaaS using open‑source databases, anywhere.
“Act Three,” he says, “is about keeping the automation benefits of the cloud without surrendering control. “You want to keep the advantage of the cloud, and then you want to make it better.”
Automation is the hyperscalers’ real advantage, he says, and it is not open source. “They might be using open‑source databases, but the automation behind the database is not something which is open source. It’s proprietary.”
Several9s positions itself squarely in Act Three, offering a unified way to deploy and manage open‑source databases across public clouds, national clouds and on-premises systems. Its platform, ClusterControl, covers the full lifecycle – deployment, scaling, monitoring, backups, failover, upgrades, patching and compliance – across PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, SQL Server, Elasticsearch and more.
From a single console, he says, “you can basically deploy in multiple clouds or in your own data centre, which means you are using the same way of doing things everywhere.” The goal is not to replace hyperscalers but to give enterprises a fallback. “Companies that put everything in the hyperscalers… they don’t have a plan B,” he says. “It takes a long time to build a plan B.”
Joosery highlights one customer example, a large African banking group operating across multiple jurisdictions, to illustrate the point. According to Several9s’ case study, the bank manages a vast hybrid environment spanning AWS, Azure, VMware, Nutanix and on-premises systems, with strict data‑residency requirements varying by country. “This is actual freedom. This is actual control,” he says.
A European company with European ownership
Several9s remains relatively small at “just under 40 people,” Joosery says, but it is profitable and employee-owned. “We are owned by the employees, we have no investors, loans, or anything like that, so we have full control over our roadmap.”
He is candid about the challenges of competing with hyperscalers, but he believes the geopolitical climate is shifting the conversation. “With the current environment, there can be retaliation by different countries,” he says, “and you need to strike the right balance.”
For Joosery, the argument is not ideological but practical. “Diversify your cloud portfolio,” he says. “If you only use one vendor, they will charge you more because they know you cannot move.”
The long-term goal, he suggests, is European resilience. “You cannot be 100% in control,” he says. “On the other hand, you cannot be 100% in the hands of a jurisdiction that has an idea of where they want to take things, which is not compatible with your own future.”
Between those extremes lies the space where Several9s has chosen to operate: a European company arguing that sovereignty begins with knowing where your data is, who controls it, and how quickly you can move it if the world changes.
