In early 2025, a regional ISP in Southeast Europe approached us with a simple question: we have 3 racks of underutilized servers and 2,000 business customers. Can we sell them cloud services?
14 months later, they have 500 paying cloud tenants, a self-service portal under their brand, and cloud services generating 40% more revenue per customer than connectivity alone. Here's how it happened.
Month 1-2: Infrastructure Assessment
Their hardware was decent but not cloud-ready. Three racks of Dell PowerEdge servers with local SSDs, a 10Gbps backbone, and basic IPMI management. No virtualization layer, no automation, no self-service capability.
We assessed the hardware, designed the OpenStack architecture (3 controller nodes, 8 compute nodes), and planned the network topology. The key decision: start with VPS only. No Kubernetes, no managed databases — just virtual machines. Get one product right before adding complexity.
Month 2-4: Deployment
OpenStack deployment, PLATFORMA integration, and portal customization. Their team chose a clean design with their brand colors and logo. We configured three VPS products: Starter (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD — €9.90/mo), Professional (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 80GB SSD — €24.90/mo), and Business (8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, 160GB SSD — €49.90/mo).
The pricing was competitive with regional hyperscaler pricing but with two advantages: data stays in-country (important for local businesses), and support is in the local language.
Month 4-6: First 50 Customers
The ISP's sales team reached out to their existing business customers. The pitch was simple: you're already paying us for internet, now you can host your servers with us too. Same provider, same support, data stays local.
The first 50 customers came from existing relationships. No advertising, no marketing campaigns. Just their sales team with a new product to offer. Average revenue per customer increased by 40%.
Month 6-10: Scaling to 200
Word of mouth kicked in. Customers told other businesses. The ISP started running targeted campaigns to local SMBs. They added a reseller program — IT consultants could sell cloud services under their own brand, powered by the ISP's infrastructure.
At 200 tenants, we hit the first scaling challenge: compute capacity. We added 4 more compute nodes. Because PLATFORMA handles capacity management, adding hardware was a one-day operation — no re-architecture required.
Month 10-14: 500 and Beyond
By month 14, 500 tenants. Monthly cloud revenue exceeded their projections by 60%. They added Kubernetes services (OpenShift namespaces) as a second product line. The ISP is now planning a second datacenter to serve customers in a neighboring country.
What Made It Work
Three things: (1) Starting with existing customer relationships — no cold outreach needed. (2) Keeping the product simple — VPS first, complexity later. (3) Having the platform ready from day one — no 12-month build phase, no engineering team to hire.