I am going to start working for one of those German cloud providers (not Schwarz Group) next month.
As far as I understand so far, the barrier-to-entry is actually a feature.
Those providers usually strictly target the B2B sector, with a focus on small to medium companies which only now start to do "digitalization". They usually still run with old-fashioned IT departments and certainly no budget to hire a full DevOps department with experienced senior developers.
For that reason, the German providers usually don't focus on scale and automation as the support burden is rather high. Hosting in Germany, and being compliant by default with many data protection rules is a big plus for inexperienced customers. But I imagine, this also leads to high customer retention due to de-facto lock-in.
Note that the article says that they are using a "proprietary" cloud platform. In my experience, in Germany "Cloud" is still a very ill-defined marketing term. It might well be possible that the "Cloud" just means that you can use a WYSIWYG interface to provision Linux VM templates (see for example the IONOS "Data Center Designer").
I had to look at the "Stackit" homepage itself to confirm that they are indeed hosting a Kubernetes based PaaS. But they indeed seem to focus on dynamic VM-Hosting and even colocation. They even mention SAP hosting!
In the past, United Internet, Deutsche Telekom and some others had a hosted e-mail offering branded as "Internet made in Germany" for similar reasons.
Another company of the "Internet made in Germany" group is Strato. They started with website and shop builders, and now make a lot of money essentially offering hosted Owncloud/Seafile services. Usually those are also marketed as a "Cloud" offering.
This makes me shudder just thinking about this, knowing how bad internet in Germany is, falling behind countries like Romania and Ukraine by several leagues.
Back in 2010 when I used to live in Berlin we found it almost fun and cute how there was bad internet, poor mobile coverage, and no credit cards accepted.
It was fun to return in 2020 and experience the exact same thing again
Those providers usually strictly target the B2B sector, with a focus on small to medium companies which only now start to do "digitalization". They usually still run with old-fashioned IT departments and certainly no budget to hire a full DevOps department with experienced senior developers.
For that reason, the German providers usually don't focus on scale and automation as the support burden is rather high. Hosting in Germany, and being compliant by default with many data protection rules is a big plus for inexperienced customers. But I imagine, this also leads to high customer retention due to de-facto lock-in.
Note that the article says that they are using a "proprietary" cloud platform. In my experience, in Germany "Cloud" is still a very ill-defined marketing term. It might well be possible that the "Cloud" just means that you can use a WYSIWYG interface to provision Linux VM templates (see for example the IONOS "Data Center Designer").
I had to look at the "Stackit" homepage itself to confirm that they are indeed hosting a Kubernetes based PaaS. But they indeed seem to focus on dynamic VM-Hosting and even colocation. They even mention SAP hosting!
In the past, United Internet, Deutsche Telekom and some others had a hosted e-mail offering branded as "Internet made in Germany" for similar reasons.
Another company of the "Internet made in Germany" group is Strato. They started with website and shop builders, and now make a lot of money essentially offering hosted Owncloud/Seafile services. Usually those are also marketed as a "Cloud" offering.