OVH gave up on hubiC

I checked our hubiC (here’s why I gave it up) today as I wanted to reconsider it for a side project and noticed that OVH gave up on hubiC as well.

Here’s the full notice from the OVH team:

In 2011, an experimental ‘Lab’ on storage technologies was met with a rapid and unexpected degree of success, so we developed this solution further and offered a more sophisticated version of it for sale.

After several months of effort and development, this ‘Lab’ became hubiC, a storage solution aimed at the general public, in order to allow everyone to reap the benefits of storage and synchronisation in the Cloud.

hubiC has been based on our Public Cloud solution since the outset (on our Public Cloud Storage, to be precise), allowing it to leverage that solution’s robustness and its underlying technologies (including OpenStack Swift). This Public Cloud Storage solution hosts over 100 PB of data, the equivalent of 25 billion MP3s or 300 million hours of video!

Even today, part of the vast quantity of data hosted on this infrastructure corresponds to the thousands of hubiC customers who trust us to store their data.

However, a service like hubiC does not rely on its storage technologies alone; there are a range of other aspects that need to be updated and monitored. Even though these other aspects fell outside our core business, we continued to develop them.

Over the years, and as the market became more and more competitive, the specifications needed for developing a solution for the general public gradually got longer and longer, and started to diverge more and more from the updates and features needed and in demand for our professional solutions.

The business of OVH is providing cloud solutions for developers, IT companies and professionals in all sectors of activity. We need to focus on our core business to consolidate our very rapid growth in Europe and the United States.

We have therefore decided to stop developing hubiC and suspend the creation of new accounts

Our very rapid growth, in line with the requirements of the professional markets, has forced us to make this difficult decision about a product that is outside the scope of our main activity.

Since we will continue to use hubiC for our own requirements the service will be maintained. Therefore, although the creation of new accounts has been suspended, existing customers can continue to use their services for an indefinite period, under the same terms and conditions. No data will be deleted and the synchronisation and backup features will remain active, as will the web application, the API and the Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android applications. The only difference is that no new features will be proposed in the future.

Furthermore, we are open to discussion if a European partner capable of providing a storage solution for everyone in accordance with OVH’s values is interested in taking over hubiC.

We would like to thank all hubiC users for their ideas and their support over the past seven years.

OVH Team (source)

By the looks of it, I would say that OVH realized hubiC was not very profitable either if we are to take into account the human resources involved with maintaining it and developing further.

Based on the info they seem to be looking for some European company to take hubiC off their hands. Anyone interested?