100% European Leadership to drive next chapter of growth
13th February 2025. CISPE has reinforced its commitment to a fully European governance structure. At its General Assembly CISPE members updated their Articles of Association to ensure that only European entities can hold board positions. Non-European cloud vendors with annual revenues exceeding of €10 billion can participate as adherent members – without influencing the Association’s governance.
As a result of these governance changes, adopted without opposition, CISPE is now the largest and only fully European-driven, independent trade body advocating for cloud infrastructure service providers and their customers across Europe. The Members also voted for a new European board.
The new governance framework also introduces a Sovereignty and Strategic Autonomy Committee, responding to the increasing demand from European cloud users, government agencies, and private sector customers for competitive, homegrown cloud infrastructure and AI solutions. This shift comes at a critical time with concern over economic and geopolitical dependencies becoming more pronounced. The urgent need for a resilient, competitive, and independent European cloud ecosystem has never been clearer.
CISPE’s Vision for the Future
In the coming year, CISPE will make bold and innovative commitments to harness Europe’s diverse and fragmented cloud ecosystem. It will focus on promoting distributed, multi-cloud, open-source solutions that enhance competition and expand choice in cloud infrastructure, AI, and critical sovereign services. In particular, CISPE’s vision will strongly benefit Europe’s SMEs, both as customers and vendors of cloud services.
CISPE remains dedicated to delivering practical tools and frameworks that support the processing and storage of data in Europe, portability, interoperability, and the transition to climate-neutral data centres by 2030.
Board Elections and Departures
CISPE board members are elected for a three-year mandate. At this general assembly six seats were up for re-election. The new board members, elected to serve for the next three years are:
- Alexander Windbichler, Anexia (Austria)
- Jake Madders, Hyve (UK)
The following board members were re-elected for a further term of three years:
- Jacqueline van de Werken, Leaseweb (Netherlands)
- David Chassan, Outscale (France)
- Lorenzo Chiriatti, Register (Italy)
After serving on the board since CISPE’s foundation and playing a key role in establishing it as Europe’s leading cloud infrastructure trade body, AWS, Gigas and UpCloud chose not to seek re-election. The CISPE board, membership and secretariat warmly thank Stephane, Diego and Antti for their dedicated service, insights and commitment over the years. All three companies remain CISPE members and will continue to contribute to its initiatives.
Leadership Statements
Returning president and chairwoman of the board, Jaqueline van de Werken, said; “This really is the next growth chapter for CISPE, led exclusively by Europeans, for Europeans. As President I intend to continue to guide the Association to embrace policies that benefit cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe and help us grow our membership. Our new structure enables us to represent the whole sector whilst standing firmly for the interests of Europeans.”
Francisco Mingorance, secretary general, added; “We value the contribution of all our departing board members and are excited to welcome the new ones. At CISPE, we have a unique ability to convene all voices to focus on critical issues. We value the contributions of large, non-European players as a vital part of the ecosystem and I am excited to invite more of Europe’s cloud champions to join us.”
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For further information please contact:
Ben Maynard
Director of Communications
+44 7968537982