Shape What Comes
Next

Where AI runs is becoming a commercial question, not a technical one.
The Next Cloud works with telcos, communications platforms and AI-native companies on the shift to distributed, sovereign intelligence — the positioning, the commercial model, and the doors that have to open for either to matter.

About Us How We Work

The first cloud centralised. The next one won’t.

Twenty years of cloud meant one direction of travel: compute out of your building and into somebody else’s very large one. AI reverses it. Inference wants to be near the data, near the user, inside the jurisdiction — which means networks, premises, devices and edge, not a handful of hyperscale campuses. We named the company after where this was going. It took twenty years to arrive.

Intelligence is becoming abundant. Nobody has decided where it lives.

When the cost of thinking collapses, demand for it doesn’t shrink — it explodes. Every question that was never worth asking becomes worth asking. That volume has to run somewhere, and the answer can’t only be a handful of hyperscale data centres. Energy, latency and law all push the other way — out toward networks, devices and enterprise infrastructure. That shift redraws who owns the customer, who captures the margin, and what a telco or a communications platform is actually selling.

We work with the companies caught in that shift.

Infrastructure and silicon players building telco routes to market. Communications platforms moving from APIs to orchestration. AI-native scaleups that need commercial grounding, and telcos deciding what they can credibly sell to regulated enterprises. Sharper positioning, a commercial model that holds up, and the relationships to test it against.

The Next Cloud is led by Rob Kurver, with a small team for events, research and delivery. That’s why we’re particular about who we work with — and why we work with a handful of companies at a time, not dozens.

COACHING

A monthly sounding board on strategy and story. We challenge, you decide.

MARKET DEVELOPMENT

Sharper positioning plus a sequenced route into telcos and partners — a route in, not a list of intros.

STRATEGIC TRANSFORMATION

For companies in the middle of a strategic shift. Around a day a week with your leadership team, up to board level. You work directly with Rob.

ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

For big plays that need a market around them — we design and build the ecosystem of partners, telcos, startups and capital that makes it real.

Opinionated

You get a position and the reasoning behind it — not a survey of what everyone else is saying.

Connected

Telcos, platforms, silicon and capital. Twelve years of rooms that are hard to get into.

Commercial

Not a trend deck. Positioning that ties to a price, a channel and a route to revenue.

We work with a small number of companies at a time. Let’s talk.

Get In Touch

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Not ready to work together? Three ways to keep in touch — none of them cost anything.

FOLLOW ROB ON LINKEDIN

Where the day-to-day thinking happens: what we’re seeing in the market, from the rooms we’re in.

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INVITE ROB TO SPEAK

Keynotes, panels and closed-door sessions on telco, cloud comms and AI. We say yes to a few a year, where the room and the topic fit.

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Insights from the Next Cloud

AI Is Not a BarbellOctober 2, 2026
Sequoia’s Cognitive Revolution maps AI at two scales, the nation and the pocket, and skips everything in between. Two weeks, two telco events, and why the value of AI is moving back into the bar: operators, cloud comms and the trust they hold together.
Nobody Negotiates Their Way Out of Being a SupplierSeptember 25, 2026
What two days in Amsterdam taught me about intelligence, trust and transformation — and why “AI needs us” is exactly how a supplier talks.
Everybody Drew the Same SlideAugust 9, 2026
Why innovating down the stack is easier than innovating up — and what that means for anyone whose position is now being rented rather than bought.
9000 people, 6.5T$ and a Bermuda TriangleJuly 12, 2026
I just spent two of the more energizing, thought-provoking days I’ve had in a while at RAISE Summit in Paris — 9,000 people at the Carrousel du Louvre, one of […]