Pascal Rogiest Appointed General Manager of Clarence

On Monday 17 June 2024, Clarence, the joint venture between LuxConnect and Proximus offering a disconnected sovereign cloud solution, announced the appointment of its new General Manager, Pascal Rogiest.

Pascal Rogiest, PhD in electromechanical aerospace engineering, former CEO of LuxTrust, former CCO of RHEA Group and former VP responsible for mergers and acquisitions at SES, has accepted a new challenge in digital trust by taking the helm of Clarence.

"We are delighted to welcome Pascal Rogiest to Clarence," said Paul Konsbruck, CEO of LuxConnect. "His expertise and leadership will undoubtedly strengthen our market position and help us achieve our strategic objectives."

"Clarence is coming at the right time, with the right operational maturity, with the right value-proposition, to meet a growing demand for data sovereignty, stimulated by today's unfortunate geopolitical context, combined with ever-increasing cyber threats and cyber terrorism risks," commented Pascal Rogiest. "Clarence represents a unique and cutting-edge bundled solution, leveraging Google's exceptional portfolio of cloud-based applications and LuxConnect's and Proximus Luxembourg's solid expertise in hosting, deploying and managing highly secure data solutions anchored in Luxembourg. I'm honoured to get the opportunity to lead the business development of Clarence in close cooperation with those esteemed teams and their groups."

Gérard Hoffmann, CEO of Proximus Luxembourg, added: "The acceleration of AI has unlocked new opportunities for our customers to process and analyse data closer to where it is generated. We are enabling a variety of open AI models, including Gemma, Llama and more on Google Disconnected Cloud. Today, we are glad to confirm that all these generative AI search packaged solutions powered by Gemma will be available on the Clarence platform current Q4 2024, and that all implementation and operational steps are on-schedule accordingly." He continued: "The arrival of Pascal Rogiest comes timely for addressing now the market opportunities identified for Clarence."

While Clarence has confirmed it will focus on serving critical data infrastructure in the Benelux, it will also address the wider European demand for data sovereignty. Such demand arises for example from European programmes in a collective initiative taken by the EU, and by European organisations, to protect the sovereignty of European citizens and institutions and the resilience of European society, in a technology mix which combines cloud with strategic applications, concluded Clarence.