fkr - exploration is key to excellence

This summer brought a big change for me. After more than 4 1/2 years as an employee with the OSBA, I’m joining Adfinis. On August 10th I started as thcountry managerer for Adfinis Germany. There is a press release by Adfinis on it. I will elaborate on this in a separate post.

Leaving the OSBA was not an easy decision. The past years have been a blast, and I got the chance to move numerous things into the right direction - for SCS, but also overall for the OSBA., likewise I had the chance to make lots of friends through our work, while also having the continous possibility to learn and grow. Today marks my official last day, so a good day to push out this post. ;)

From an idea…

The first time I heard about the idea that would later become the Sovereign Cloud Stack project was in an OSBA Board meeting. Our chairman, Peter Ganten brought the idea to the table, and I still remember how thrilled I was to hear about it. Back then I was still with gridscale. Initially I accompanied the early steps through my volunteer work serving on the extended Board of Directors at the OSBA until I decided that I wanted to play a full-time role in this endeavor. I applied for the role of product owner for the Infrastructure as a Service and Operation part. Alongside Kurt Garloff, Dirk Loßack, Manuela Urban, Eduard Itrich, and Bianca Hollery-Pfister, we took the next steps until further people joined and the team grew to its final size of 14 (Dominik Pataky, Max Wolfs, Alexander Diab, Nadja Schieber, Marc Schöchlin, Friederike Zelke, Artem Goncharov, Regina Metz).

…to something real and relevant

Over the course of three years, we built up an awesome commuity, and welcomed companies to the ranks of the early adopters just as much as various contributors. That we built something to last became even more clear when we approached the final year of the funding project and were looking into sustaining the future of the Sovereign Cloud Stack. Thanks to the 14 founding members of the Forum SCS-Standards, we were able to pull that off, and I had the joy and fun to lead the Forum SCS-Standards from January 2025 on.

In June 2025 Lisa Seifert and Marvin Frommhold joined the team of the Forum SCS-Standards, and together with the many people engaged from our community, we were able to make excellent progress on our ambitious roadmap and assure that the idea of the Forum SCS-Standards was prolonged. We established the Certifications - quiet an important item, since in SCS we always talked about ‘certifiable Standards’. In September 2025, we certified SCS-compatible IaaS cloud offerings as well as Integrators - seven months later, we certified SCS-compatible KaaS already! The whole road to KaaS-certification was only possible because of the cool teamwork within our community.

I’m very proud of what we as a community and in the various teams have achieved over the past years. Even more, I’m genuinely grateful for the support we’ve seen from the various companies in the ecosystem, the members of the OSBA, the executive board of directors of the OSBA, the speakers of the Forum Janis Kemper and Ralph Dehner and many individuals just as much as other important initiatives such as ALASCA. Thanks to this, the Forum is striving and has grown to 20 companies supporting the idea of the Sovereign Cloud Stack Stand.

ECO:DIGIT

Another important part of the last years was the ECO:DIGIT Project. In November 2024 it became clear that I would take over the role leading the OSBA-part of this project until the defined end in May 2026. There have been numerous publications on our efforts with ECO:DIGIT, so I will not go into any technical depth here.

Both projects had in common that I was able to do what I really enjoy: connect people, pave the way, and make sure there is the best environment for others to strive to excel whilst having loads of fun :)