Innovation contest - 2020 recap

News Feb 18, 2021

What is the Innovation contest

In May 2019, we applied to the "concours innovation I-nov", a program of the French government to help startups like us, investing in innovative projects in various sectors, including virtualization and security. For this application, we created a proposal around the hardening and performance improvements of the XCP-ng Virtualization platform.

Vates was one of the winning companies in the competition, and it's only a small percentage of participants! As a result, we have since secured funding of €1.2 million over a period of 3 years, matching 45% of our minimal total planned investment.

In other words, we are investing at least €2.7 million in XCP-ng R&D for the next 3 years!

Our target

Thanks to this funding, we are aiming to improve most of the current components in XCP-ng, with a special focus on the hardening and cybersecurity of the platform. Here are the major topics we are exploring:

Network: improved isolation and encryption
Storage: encryption & replication with minimal impact
Compute: isolation & hardening
Platform security
Global performance enhancements
Turnkey integration of all components

A word about COVID-19 impact

Of course, 2020 has not been a year like any other and some of our projects have been hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis. In particular, we had planned to recruit several additional staff for the XCP-ng project. The constraints of the health crisis in the world and in France made these procedures more complex. That said, we have several recruitments underway.

What we have done in 2020

Regardless, 2020 marked the first year in which we actively worked on innovation topics in XCP-ng, particularly in the context of strengthening the platform.

Our R&D team is now composed of 5 people (+ Olivier, our CEO), working full-time on the XCP-ng Project and mostly on innovation.