Expanding cloud capabilities without vendor lock-In: The KDDI France Story

Infrastructure projects rarely stay confined to their initial scope. What begins as a need to deliver new services often leads to a broader reflection on how those services are built, operated, and sustained over time.

At KDDI France, the starting point was clear: strengthen the company’s cloud offering. But instead of layering new services onto the existing stack, the team chose to reassess the foundations supporting them.

A practical need that triggered a deeper evaluation

The objective was simple on paper: expand the range of services available to customers.

Yet, delivering new services efficiently requires more than additional features. It depends on having a platform that can scale without introducing unnecessary cost or operational friction.

This realization shifted the discussion from short-term needs to long-term structure.

Cost pressure is only part of the equation

During the evaluation phase, two constraints quickly stood out: the growing weight of licensing costs and the limitations imposed by tightly controlled ecosystems. Together, these factors are increasingly influencing how infrastructure decisions are made.

Organizations are no longer focused solely on performance; they are also looking for ways to maintain control over how their platforms evolve over time.

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For KDDI France, the question became less about replacing a solution and more about choosing a direction that would remain viable over time.

Choosing a solution that works in practice

Several options were evaluated as the team took the time to identify the platform that would best fit their operational reality. The objective was not to compare feature lists, but to find a virtualization platform that would perform reliably in real-world production environments and support long-term infrastructure strategy.

In that context, two elements proved particularly important. The first was how high availability (HA) is managed in practice, as this directly impacts service continuity and operational reliability. The second was the quality of the enterprise support, ensuring that issues can be addressed quickly and efficiently when needed.

For a service provider, these are not secondary criteria. Reliability and responsiveness directly impact the ability to deliver consistent services to customers.

Moving forward without disruption

Rather than approaching the project as a large-scale overhaul, KDDI France introduced Vates VMS progressively, using it to support new services and extend their infrastructure capabilities.

This approach made it possible to move forward without disrupting existing operations, while still benefiting from improvements early on.

But beyond the immediate savings, the real value came from how resources could be used more strategically across the infrastructure. Existing hardware could be reused more efficiently, reducing the need for additional investments, while capacity management became more flexible, allowing teams to adjust resources based on actual demand.

This also made it possible to introduce new cloud services without driving proportional increases in infrastructure costs, creating a more scalable and cost-effective model overall.

Building on a more flexible foundation

As the platform was integrated, it became clear that the benefits extended beyond cost optimization.

Vates VMS provided a framework that better aligned with KDDI France’s long-term objectives:

• Reducing dependency on proprietary technologies
• Keeping control over infrastructure choices
• Adapting more easily to evolving customer needs

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This kind of flexibility is particularly valuable in environments where services are constantly evolving.

Looking ahead

The project is still evolving, but the direction is now clearly defined. By combining cost efficiency with a more flexible virtualization platform, KDDI France has established a solid foundation to expand its cloud services in a controlled and sustainable way, while maintaining long-term infrastructure agility.

A gradual but meaningful shift

What started as a service expansion initiative gradually turned into a broader infrastructure transformation. Rather than simply adding new capabilities on top of the existing stack, KDDI France reworked part of its virtualization infrastructure to better support growth, improve cost control, and increase operational flexibility.

This evolution highlights an important reality: infrastructure decisions are never purely technical. They directly shape how organizations scale, adapt to change, and maintain control over their IT strategy in the long run.