About Us
We believe intelligence is moving into the network—and that most of the industry is still selling the architecture it replaces.
Where AI runs is becoming a commercial question, not a technical one. Data residency, regulation and the physics of inference are pushing compute out of central data centres and toward the edge—into 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.
The industrial revolution had a geography. Coal was somewhere. Rail went somewhere. Fortunes were made by whoever owned the ground the material moved across. The current story about AI is told as if cognition were placeless—infinite intelligence, everywhere, from nowhere in particular. It isn’t. Sovereignty, residency and regulation give it a location, and that means somebody owns the ground it runs on. Working out who, and what they can sell as a result, is most of what we do.
The Next Cloud works 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. Sharper positioning, a commercial model that holds up, and the doors that have to open for either to matter.
Help founders & teams build what’s Next
With clarity, speed and traction.
From AI-native scaleups to telcos rebuilding their stack—we make the next architecture commercial.
A small team with a long network
Not a consultancy. Not an agency.
Twelve years of telco, CPaaS and AI relationships, used deliberately.
What we do
- Advisory – positioning, commercial model, and where you fit
- Channel – doors into telcos, platforms and partners
- Ecosystem – designing and building the market around big plays
The team
Small on purpose. Led by Rob, with the people who make the ecosystem happen.
Rob Kurver
FOUNDING PARTNER
Strategist, storyteller and ecosystem builder at the crossroads of telco, cloud communications and AI. Rob works directly with founders, leadership teams and boards on positioning, commercial models and the doors that need to open.
He took KPN’s API Store from concept to launch, co-founded CPaaSAA and hosts CASA, its annual summit.
On stage in 2026: MWC Barcelona, BATIC (Telin) in Bali, the Vonage Global Leadership Summit and CASA26 — with the Crexendo user group meeting and MWC Doha still to come.
Laila van Hooff
EVENT MANAGER
The creative force behind the stages where the ecosystem meets. Laila designs and delivers the programmes — CASA, CPaaSAA Talks and, before that, the SmartCom Summit — bringing people, content and moments together with energy and precision.
When we build an ecosystem for a client, the rooms, the running order and the moments people remember are hers.
Why “The Next Cloud”
The first cloud was a centralisation bet and it paid handsomely. Everything moved to the middle. The cognitive era runs the other way: the economics of inference, the physics of latency and the law of data residency all push compute back out toward the edge of the network. That is the next cloud — distributed by default, closer to the customer, answerable to a jurisdiction. It is the architecture we have been pointing at since 2014, and the one that finally has a business model attached.
Based out of the beautiful city of Amsterdam, working globally.