Your own cloud. On your own hardware. Deployed in weeks, not months.
You want to regain control of your infrastructure without spending months on a foundational project. With the Sovereign Cloud Quick Starter Pack, BearingPoint delivers a fully sovereign OpenStack platform on your own hardware, hosted in your own data center or housing. Clear scope. Clear timeline.
A tailored proposal following a 30-minute initial consultation covering your environment and operational expertise.
The equation is simple: organizations that rely on virtualization platforms or public cloud services are paying more each year while gaining less flexibility and independence.
Virtualization: Since Broadcom's acquisition of VMware at the end of 2023, many customers have experienced price increases ranging from +150% to over +1,000%. Perpetual licenses have been discontinued and the new 72-core minimum per CPU particularly impacts small and mid-sized deployments. Organizations that do not renew contracts in time face an additional 20% penalty fee.
Hyperscalers: Azure increased prices for core infrastructure services in 2025 by approximately 10-12% and introduced a 5% surcharge for monthly billing. AWS doubled inter-availability-zone traffic costs and increased cross-region data transfer pricing by 25-40%. Google Cloud raised Workspace subscription pricing by 20-34%.
Overall Trend: Cloud spending is projected to grow by 19% across industries in 2025, not necessarily because organizations consume more services, but because the cost per unit continues to rise.
Sovereignty: Political sanctions, export restrictions, and vendor decisions can impact your operations at any time. A "sovereign" label alone is no substitute for verifiable data sovereignty, portability, and operational independence.
The Sovereign Cloud Quick Starter Pack is a productized OpenStack deployment based on Vanilla OpenStack, implemented using Kayobe and Kolla-Ansible, and built entirely on open-source technologies. There is no vendor lock-in.
CAPEX instead of unexpected OPEX. In the 200-VM Excel scenario, BearingPoint Sovereign Cloud is approximately 32% more cost-efficient than VMware VCF and around 8% more cost-efficient than Azure over five years.
A standardized deployment process based on Infrastructure as Code, ranging from a 1-node proof of concept to a highly available multi-node cluster.
Your data remains on your hardware and under your jurisdiction. No CLOUD Act. No Patriot Act.
Vanilla OpenStack and open standards. A portable architecture that can be migrated at any time.
Tenants, projects, roles, quotas, and networks are built natively into OpenStack, making it ideal for teams, business units, and platform operating models.
Users can provision compute, storage, and networking resources themselves through Horizon, APIs, or service catalogs, governed by clear policies and quotas.
OpenStack is API-first and can be operated consistently using Infrastructure as Code practices.
Seamless transition to our Sovereign Cloud Managed Support service, where we operate, patch, and monitor your platform 24/7, if desired.
Ideal for: Initial evaluation, innovation labs, and proof-of-concept projects
Scope: All-in-one node deployment, basic networking, test tenants, and handover workshop
Duration: 1–2 weeks
Ideal for: Departmental PoCs, team cloud environments, and first workloads
Scope: 3-node converged setup + 1 MAAS/PXE node, basic Ceph deployment, SSO integration, backup concept, and 1-day administrator training
Duration: 3–4 weeks
Ideal for: First production workloads with high availability requirements
Scope: 3 HA control nodes + n× compute nodes + 2 network nodes + 1 MAAS/PXE node, HA Ceph, basic monitoring, runbooks, and operations handover
Duration: 6–8 weeks
Ideal for: Production environments across two data centers with BCM/DR capabilities
Scope: Everything included in L, plus a second site, replication, BCM/DR concept, and network design in collaboration with your team
Duration: 10–14 weeks
Tailored proposal after a 30-minute initial consultation
Starting point: A mid-sized company operating approximately 200 virtual machines, based on a high-availability production setup with quorum architecture.
|
Cost category |
VMware |
Hyperscaler |
BearingPoint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware-Investment | € 880.000 | € 0 | € 950.000 |
| Licence costs | € 1.300.000 | € 110.000 | € 0 |
| Managed support | € 0 | € 0 | € 200.000 |
| Cloud costs | € 0 | € 1.640.000 | € 0 |
| Operations (Housing & personnel) | € 1.580.000 | € 830.000 | € 1.110.000 |
| Total | € 3.760.000 | € 2.580.000 | € 2.260.000 |
All options are calculated as a greenfield deployment or complete infrastructure refresh for 200 production virtual machines.
VMware VCF includes a comparable production-ready platform consisting of compute, management, redundant networking, and SAN/vSAN storage.
OpenStack includes a highly available, quorum-capable target architecture comprising compute, management, networking, Ceph storage, Ceph quorum, redundant networking, out-of-band management, and hardware support.
Operating costs are based on the TCO_Cloud_KMU_v5 Excel calculation and include the respective operating model over a five-year period.
VMware VCF includes platform operations as well as vendor- and subscription-related operational efforts.
Hyperscaler (Azure) includes reduced infrastructure operations but still requires Cloud Governance, Landing Zones, Identity & Access Management (IAM), networking, security, backup, monitoring, FinOps, and support and operational processes.
BearingPoint Sovereign Cloud lists Managed Support as a separate cost category and correspondingly reduces the assumed internal operational effort required for the OpenStack/Ceph platform.
The total cost of ownership (TCO) is calculated over a five-year period. In this model, OpenStack becomes more cost-effective starting at approximately 200 production VMs. As environments continue to scale, the cost advantage typically increases, as additional workloads primarily consume hardware and operational capacity, while licensing, subscription, and cloud consumption costs tend to grow more significantly.
In this calculation, BearingPoint Sovereign Cloud is approximately €1.5 million (around 40%) less expensive than VMware VCF and approximately €320,000 (around 12%) less expensive than Azure.
The cost advantage over Azure is therefore present but considerably smaller than the advantage over VMware VCF. Key factors influencing the outcome include cloud consumption patterns, annual price increases, utilization levels, storage and traffic profiles, and the chosen operating model.
The break-even point is typically reached within the five-year evaluation period. Compared to Azure, the gap is smaller in this scenario and depends heavily on the actual consumption curve, including annual price increases, storage and network traffic requirements, support plans, and managed services.
TCO reduction over five years:
• Approximately 32% compared to VMware VCF
• Approximately 8% compared to Azure in this 200-VM scenario.
Don't want to operate the platform yourself? The Sovereign Cloud Managed Support Package seamlessly builds on the Quick Starter:
10+
Years of OpenStack in productive use – we operate BECloud on the same architecture.
Years of operating our own on-premises infrastructure in our own data center – giving us extensive expertise across traditional server, network, and storage hardware, as well as modern AI server infrastructure and corresponding use cases. COA-certified engineers directly certified by the OpenInfra Foundation.
Vanilla OpenStack as the standard – fully sovereign, without vendor or distribution lock-in
European consulting, European legal framework, European support
Transparent proposal model – tailored to your environment, target architecture, and operational expertise
A non-binding 30-minute discovery call. During this session, we discuss your target architecture, current hardware landscape, existing expertise, and determine which package best fits your requirements. Based on these insights, we provide you with a tailored proposal.
