Cologne, 8 October 2026. iits-consulting reached the final shortlist of the EuroCloud Award 2026 in two categories and came second in both. Our cooperation with T Cloud Public on Deutsche Telekom's Industrial AI Cloud placed second for Best Cooperation Project, and KumoOps placed second for Best Disruption.
The awards were decided at the EuroCloud Summit, hosted this year by plusserver in Cologne-Porz under the theme of cloud in times of AI and sovereignty, where each finalist then had five minutes on stage before the audience voted for the winner.
Best Cooperation Project: Industrial AI Cloud
The project behind this entry is the Industrial AI Cloud, Europe's largest private-sector platform for sovereign, compliant AI, where iits-consulting supported the Telekom operations team in building and administering the GPU cluster from the start.
At the heart of that work was SLURM, the workload manager that checks which GPUs are free and distributes jobs across them by priority. We took care of its configuration and administration, so the cluster was ready to run large workloads from the moment the first clients arrived.
Beyond the cluster itself, our work goes in two directions. On the platform side, we continue to configure and test the facility and pass on what users need from it. On the user side, we advise and onboard the teams who compute on the platform. We help them adapt their scripts to the hardware and manage their data, and we advise them on which workers suit their use case and how several departments can use the facility separately or together.
The platform's first client was SOOFI, a project training an open European language model, so the infrastructure had to handle large-scale training from day one.
Best Disruption: From Time & Material to Product
Our second entry told the story of how we turned our cloud operations business into a product. Like most service providers, we used to sell cloud operations by the hour, project by project, and built a new environment by hand for every customer. At some point, we decided to stop. Today, cloud operations at iits-consulting only exist as KumoOps, a subscription with a public price list, an SLA and a catalogue of add-ons, running in the customer's own cloud account.
Customers now book a subscription with a fixed price list, and every environment runs on one shared blueprint. Customers also hold their own cloud contract, so we no longer earn a margin on their cloud consumption, and their code lives in their own Git repository, with an exit included.
Consulting for setup and requirements continues as before, but ongoing operations as an hourly business are gone.
The setup runs on both T Cloud Public and Azure, a security hardening update can reach every customer on the same day. Customers get 99.95% availability guaranteed in the SLA, and the building blocks behind KumoOps, more than 55 Terraform modules and 40 Helm charts.
Thank you ❤️
Thank you to everyone in Cologne who voted for us, to T Cloud Public team for a partnership worth pitching, and to EuroCloud Deutschland and plusserver for the summit. Congratulations to this year's winners.
