Europe gearing up to provide AI services

Alternatives to US hosted generative models becoming available with Nextcloud use case and customers

Wednesday, April 3 2024 – Nextcloud, the most deployed on-premises collaboration platform, announces that it is working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS and OVH to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub. Several Nextcloud customers have expressed interest in these features and are preparing or in the process of to testing them.

OVHcloud is thrilled to collaborate with Nextcloud in delivering state-of-the-art Digital Sovereign AI solutions to our customers. We are aligned with Nextcloud’s commitment to offering secure, privacy-conscious AI functionalities that safeguard training data and adhere strictly to GDPR regulations. We are excited to announce that this integration will become available in Q2 2024, marking a significant milestone in our journey towards responsible AI innovation.

Said Germain Masse, AI Product Marketing Manager at OVHCloud

We are proud to offer Nextcloud customers a solution that complies with European data protection regulations. Reliable, trustworthy, and local AI services will be key to protecting their digital sovereignty for both the public and private sectors in Europe.

Said IONOS

US technology firms have a large head start on European companies offering large language models and other AI services to smaller firms and end customers. There is a significant number of offerings either using their own models like OpenAI, or providing one or a choice of open models like Llama, Gemma or Mixtral as a service. In Europe, Mistral and Aleph Alpha are still working offer their own models while only a few large hosting providers are looking to offer various open LLM’s in an AI-as-a-service model.

At the same time, there is a quickly growing demand from Nextcloud customers for AI services. However the significant hardware and knowledge requirements to operate AI models is a barrier to many. AI-as-a-Service from foreign tech firms is not a solution for most Nextcloud customers, given the privacy and sovereignty risks inherent to shipping large amounts of crucial data overseas. There is thus a demand for European, privacy-compliant AI services that can be easily integrated in Nextcloud.

In the future, we will make AI services available to colleagues in the state administration directly at the workplace. We want to drive the development of digitally sovereign and open solutions in addition to the use of existing AI services such as ChatGPT. Because, the administration of the future will work in an automated, algortihmized, cloudified and data-based way. To make this vision of the future a reality, we must provide the appropriate tools. This also creates value and jobs in our domestic digital economy.

Said Minister of Digitisation and Head of the State Chancellery Dirk Schrödter, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

We at SUNET are happy that that Nextcloud Assistent is 100% Free and Open Source, runs On-Premise and provides useful features that we hope will benefit our users going forward. We enjoy the very productive collaboration with Nextcloud.

Said Mike Nordin, Sunet, the Swedish University Computer Network

These integrations will be designed for the second major release of the Nextcloud Assistant. Version 2.0 of the Assistant introduces Context Chat, Context Writer and a series of significant user interface and feature upgrades to existing abilities. With Context Chat, users can ask the Assistant questions about their own documents, emails and other content. Context Writer allows a user to ask the Assistant to (re)write text in a desired style, either from a style description or by giving an example text. Finally, the new Assistant brings a series of user interface improvements, the ability to provide a document as input, vast performance increases through GPU acceleration and support for a wide range of new models.

The integration with the AI-as-a-service offerings Nextcloud develops with its partners OVH, IONOS and others will be made available over the coming weeks. These will be designed to take advantage of the release of the second major version of the Nextcloud Assistant, which is available today for users of Nextcloud Hub 7 and will be integrated in our upcoming Nextcloud Hub 8 release.

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud Hub is the leading open source, on-premises content collaboration platform with a strong focus on data protection. It is deployed by tens of thousands of organizations to stay in control of their sensitive content in compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.

Nextcloud presents a unified, comprehensive platform addressing collaboration needs through document sharing, real-time editing, video conferencing, calendaring, mail and other capabilities. This singular approach across mobile, web and desktop interfaces provides a superior user experience and increased productivity.

It is designed with an open, modular architecture that enables organizations to optimize their content collaboration both within and outside their organization. More information on nextcloud.com.

Links

• About Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/about
• Announcement blog with more details: Nextcloud releases Assistant 2.0 and pushes AI-as-a-Service

For questions, contact:

Jos Poortvliet
Marketing Director
Phone: +49 (0) 171 121 7528
pr@nextcloud.com