AOE Is a STACKIT Focus Partner! What That Means for kloudease Customers

At the Partner Summit 2026 hosted by Schwarz Digits, STACKIT presented its partner ecosystem. AOE is listed there as one of 28 Focus Partners – out of an ecosystem of more than 1,000 partners in total. Alongside that, we are a Silver Partner in the STACKIT Partners League 2026 and among the top three partners of the Shift to Sovereignty campaign.

Partnership announcements are quick to write and rarely say much. So here is an attempt to be concrete: what does this status mean, and what does it change for companies working with kloudease?

Three classifications that often get confused

The STACKIT partner ecosystem spans more than 1,000 companies, divided into three groups: SI partners (systems integrators), Core partners and ISV partners (software vendors). Within the SI group, STACKIT differentiates further by depth of collaboration – from strategic partners through Focus and Emerging partners to the broad base.

The Focus Partner status describes our role within that SI group: a selected set of 28 companies in which AOE sits alongside firms such as adesso, SVA, Materna, Bechtle and KPMG.

The Silver status describes something else, namely the tier within the STACKIT Partners League. That programme is tiered: each level builds on the benefits of the one below it, from go-to-market material and opportunity registration through training at STACKIT University to exclusive events, funding, leads and dedicated support at the higher tiers.

Taken together, this means a short line into the organisation, early access to technical developments, and a direct escalation path when a customer project depends on it. Because STACKIT follows a partner-first approach and first determines which partner from the ecosystem best fits an incoming customer request, the classification is more than a logo on a slide.

Top three in the Shift to Sovereignty campaign

With the Shift to Sovereignty campaign, STACKIT recognises partner companies that have guided customers through migrations to STACKIT and demonstrated particular consulting and integration capability. The three awarded partners were honoured in Heilbronn in September 2026: alongside AOE, the consultancy Liquam and the IT services provider Rewion, whose in-house sovereignty check uncovers existing vendor lock-ins at customer sites.

In its rationale, STACKIT highlights two points about AOE: the joint work on complex enterprise and cloud-native projects, and the close alignment with STACKIT's product teams. Through the STACKIT Marketplace we offer two services – the managed Kubernetes platform kloudease and managed n8n for automation workflows.

Bernd Wagner, CSO of STACKIT, summed up the occasion in a sentence we like, because it applies to our customer projects just as well: "Infrastructure resilience is not something you achieve on your own." (translated from the German original)

The award matters to us less as a trophy than as a signal that the demand is real. Over the past months, sovereignty has moved from a compliance question to an architectural one.

Why STACKIT in particular

kloudease is deliberately not tied to any one infrastructure. The platform runs on STACKIT, AWS, Azure and GCP just as well as in your own data centre on VMware or OpenStack – that stays true, and the choice remains the customer's.

Where sovereignty is part of the requirement, however, STACKIT holds a defensible position. In the European Commission's cloud procurement in April 2026, the first conducted under the new Cloud Sovereignty Framework, STACKIT reached SEAL-3 – "Digital Resilience". SEAL-2 was the threshold for eligibility; SEAL-3 means the service rests predominantly on European technology and cannot be blocked by an actor outside the EU.

That is not a marketing claim but an externally assessed result in a public tender. For customers in regulated industries and the public sector, it is an argument that can be evidenced.

What changes concretely for customers

• One responsibility boundary instead of two contracts side by side. STACKIT provides compute, storage, networking and managed Kubernetes. kloudease takes on everything above that: the platform layer, operations and on-call. You discuss operations with us, not with two vendors.
• Procurement through the Marketplace. kloudease and managed n8n are available via the STACKIT Marketplace, which simplifies purchasing and billing.
• A proven architecture rather than a first build. The combination is in production use with us and is not meant as a reference architecture.
• No lock-in through the back door. The platform stack stays open source and CNCF-conformant. The decision for STACKIT remains reversible – which is precisely the point of sovereignty.

What comes next

The status is not a goal but a working basis. For the coming months that means joint architectures for customers with sovereignty requirements, closer coordination on migrations out of existing environments, and further articles on what sovereignty actually means beyond the location of a data centre.

If you are facing a decision like this, talk to us. Including when a different infrastructure turns out to be the right one.