Today City Network becomes a part of Iver, a Nordic IT operating services provider.
Together we become a European cloud alternative for Swedish and international companies and governments who need a complete, technically leading, and global base for their digital innovation.
I see it as the first day of the rest of our journey and to kick it off, I would like to give a personal reflection and insight in to the history and the vision that stands behind this decision and the future we are heading towards.
I founded City Network shortly after the latest Dot-com bubble. Internet usage had increased and I experimented with one good idea after the next, mainly in the gaming industry. City Network began as a shared webhosting provider to meet the demands of computing power that my own projects had. But that type of shared it-infrastructure was also something that I really wanted to explore and that I believed in.
When the dust had settled around my different projects (some of which we’re actually quite good and grew like crazy), City Network was still there as the brightest star in the sky. The star that provided the back bone to all of the smaller projects that I spent my time on proved to be the source of everything. Eventually my team and I decided to try and become Sweden’s biggest provider of web hosting and domain services with City Network.
Just think what focus, determination and a bunch of people with shared values can accomplish. The little company with its HQ in a small town named Karlskrona grew tremendously. We received prizes like it was an assembly line and developed our services at a furious pace. 2009 we took a couple of leaps forward as we launched Sweden’s first cloud-based it-infrastructure as a service. Already from the start, we saw ourselves as the obvious, European alternative to the earth-shattering transformation that Amazon launched with AWS a few years earlier.
As cloud services became a natural part of everyday life the world around us begun to change. Right or wrong, companies that could collect and process data to their advantage became more valued than the ones that found new oil springs. Today many say that data is worth more than gold and with that a new point has naturally risen to the top of the agenda. Personal integrity.
But legislation has also caught up. Today we have a slew of data protection laws and measures to protect personal integrity. In the front lines we see GDPR as a crystal-clear reflection of the European core values. That personal information must be protected because personal integrity is part of the human rights that the member states of the European Union have agreed upon.
Many large businesses have an important question on their desks now these days. The one about how to combine digital innovation while adhering to the regulatory demands. The knowledge about the local market, as well as the legal and business-oriented prerequisites is something that we have built up during many years and it is a vital part of our offering.
During the years City Network has also changed and we have found our focus. We are heavily engaged in open source and are involved in developing one of the largest open source projects in the world. 2015 we launched Compliant Cloud for regulatory challenged industries that just can’t use a regular, public cloud for their data. 2017 we sold our domain- and webhosting business to wholeheartedly focus on our vision – to be a globally acclaimed It-infrastructure company.
Throughout the years, our aim has always been true to that last part. Those words that we have written down as the City Network vision – To become a globally acclaimed IT-infrastructure company.
For me and all my colleagues at City Network, and for those of you who depend on us for your digital innovation, this acquisition brings amazing possibilities to get closer to that vison. Not to mention that it allows for us to develop even more innovative services together.
There is a difference between baggage and history and ours is the latter. A history that I’m unreasonably proud to have with me as we now take the next giant leap and enter a new era of growth and expansion together with Iver.
Yours sincerely
Johan Christenson