Early on, we recognised that building a coherent and extensible cloud platform did not require creating every component ourselves. It required connecting the right technologies, operators and expertise within an open ecosystem.
At the heart of our strategy are three foundational pillars: customer centricity, innovation through collaboration, and mutual growth. These principles guide how we work with partners, support our users, and continuously enhance our platform.
1. Customer Centricity
Our first and foremost commitment is to our users. Every partnership we forge is evaluated through the lens of customer value. Does it address a real need? Does it simplify processes? Does it contribute to a better experience for developers and teams?
When our users expressed the need for enhanced observability capabilities, we didn’t just take note, we acted. For example, our partnership with Elastic brought Elasticsearch into our ecosystem in a way that is fully integrated, production-ready, designed to work seamlessly from day one. This made Clever Cloud one of the very few global players able to offer Elasticsearch Platinum. It’s a clear example of how we listen, respond, and collaborate to create tangible impact.
Customer centricity is more than listening; it’s about co-developing practical, scalable solutions that simplify everyday operations. Our goal is to ensure that the services we provide and the partnerships we cultivate consistently reduce complexity, enhance reliability, and support developers through every stage of their application lifecycle.
2. Innovation Through Collaboration
True progress occurs when diverse minds come together to tackle complex challenges. At Clever Cloud, we view collaboration not as a convenience, but as a catalyst for innovation. We work alongside a wide range of partners, from open-source communities and research institutions such as Institut Mines-Télécom to industry consortia, to explore new ideas and build forward-looking technologies.
We actively contribute to open-source projects like Eclipse Biscuit, Sōzu, and Exherbo Linux, which are integral to our cloud stack. Our contributions help drive development in areas critical to both our infrastructure and the broader ecosystem.
In parallel, we engage with European and national initiatives such as ReNESENS, Hyper Open X, and CollabNext, helping to shape standards, foster knowledge exchange, and build next-generation technologies. We also partner with academic and research institutions, encouraging experimentation and long-term thinking that benefits everyone in the tech ecosystem, from students, professors and research labs to leading edge innovation engineering teams and industrialization.
In this context, our commitment to innovation through collaboration is also a key enabler of the Strategic Digital Autonomy approach: we believe in cultivating autonomy by fostering interoperability, reversibility, and transparency through open standards and open-source technologies. This reinforces our partners’ and customers’ ability to adapt, evolve, and remain competitive.
3. Mutual Growth
We believe that strong partnerships should be mutually rewarding. That’s why we strive to create opportunities that help both Clever Cloud and our partners grow together.
Our marketplace reflects this philosophy. It brings together Clever Cloud’s core services with powerful tools and technologies from partners like Elastic, Azimutt, MailPace, and open-source projects such as Keycloak, Metabase, Otoroshi among many others.
We embrace two distinct types of relationships for the Marketplace: first-party add-ons, which are co-created with partners and fully managed by Clever Cloud as part of our platform; and third-party add-ons, where Clever Cloud acts as a distribution channel while the partner independently manages and supports their service;
In addition to this, we also develop strategic partnerships, where we collaborate with trusted providers to integrate their solutions into our portfolio, ensuring our customers have access to a broad, reliable toolkit for their infrastructure needs.
This ecosystem allows our customers to access a rich, integrated suite of services in a unified environment, while giving our partners valuable visibility and access to our user base.
Mutual growth also means ensuring that Clever Cloud and its ecosystem work seamlessly with other bare metal and IaaS cloud service providers, expanding the flexibility, performance, and scalability options available to our users. As such, in addition to its own infrastructure, Clever Cloud is also available on a range of leading European sovereign cloud service providers, including OVHcloud, Scaleway, Cloud Temple and 3DS OUTSCALE’s SecNumCloud services.
In the same way in Africa and Asia, we collaborate with local actors to foster digital sovereignty and cloud adoption by supporting infrastructure strengthening and local talent development, co-developing solutions that embrace open innovation and technology reversibility.
We extend this mutual growth commitment through our UP startup program, which supports emerging companies with technical resources, mentorship, and market insights. It is designed not just to provide credits, but to deliver meaningful guidance and opportunities for growth.
A Shared Vision for the Cloud
These three pillars, customer centricity, innovation through collaboration, and mutual growth, are not separate initiatives. They are deeply interconnected values that shape how we build, grow, and engage with our ecosystem.
At Clever Cloud, we’re not just talking about partnerships: we’re taking the initiative to build them. We’re actively engaging with database, developer tools, security, user-facing SaaS providers, and other technology vendors. Whether you’ve already been approached or not, this is an open invitation to join forces, know that we’re still ready to build together with one clear message: our goal is to complement existing catalogs, not to do everything alone.
Our mindset is all about revenue sharing, not about one party financing the other. We’re in this as equals, aiming to co-create value and drive real impact. This isn’t a ‘wait-and-see’ mindset. It’s a deliberate, open, and proactive stance, and we’re looking for partners who share it.
Ultimately, these partnerships are not just about growth, they’re about delivering real, tangible benefits to cloud users. By combining complementary expertise, we broaden what customers can deploy, reduce integration work and accelerate access to production-ready technologies. The result is a more coherent and reliable experience for developers, startups and enterprises.
If this approach resonates with you, get in touch. Let’s build something meaningful together.