Frank Karlitschek started Nextcloud as an open source project to power a decentralized internet, believing that companies should control their own data. As an engineer in computer science, he worked on many open source projects throughout his career.
Frank leveraged these experiences to create Nextcloud, open source software that anyone can use and deploy as they see fit; whether on a server in a closet, in a data center where they lease space, or in the cloud where customers remain in control through hosting offered by cloud partners like Linode. Nextcloud provides an open source productivity suite, similar to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, but allows users to see inside the software and adapt it for their unique use cases.
Frank believes innovation, privacy, and price should have open choices. You can deploy Nextcloud on any cloud provider—your choice—to suit your use case. For example, governments in Europe process petabytes of data each day. For those organizations, the cost and terms of hosting that data could be untenable. And when restrictions around encryption, data locality, or GDPR compliance come into play, challenges inevitably arise.
“Our customers include the German, French, and Swedish governments, as well as large enterprises and over 100 universities around the world,” said Frank. “Tens of millions of users trust us to keep their data and collaborations private and secure. It’s been an amazing journey to see all these organizations embracing the value of freedom and privacy.”
Nextcloud All-In-One (AIO)—available on the Linode Marketplace—gives customers with any number of users a bundled app and infrastructure pairing that keeps data fully in their control. The Nextcloud application is configured to make it easier for users to deploy on Linode with one click.
“Host it yourself, or host it with a service provider that you choose,” Frank explained. “If you find another provider you want to try, or if you want to take your data back to your private server, you can move at any time. The shared values of consumer choice and freedom from lock-in are part of what makes this a great partnership. That’s the power of Nextcloud on Linode.”
Committed to a decentralized standard for the internet, Nextcloud has no intentions of offering a SaaS solution. Partnerships are also highly valued at Nextcloud; therefore, competition with partners is not part of the company’s strategy. Frank had used Linode for a couple of personal projects over the years and believes that it’s one of the best places for people to run Nextcloud.
“We’re good at software, so that is what we focus on,” said Frank. “We want to partner with other companies that are good at providing quality, reliable, secure, affordable infrastructure. For that, Linode is the best.”
