Opportunities for Commercial Cloud Service Providers in the EOSC

EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) is an integrated platform that allows easy access to lots of services and resources for various research domains along with integrated data analytics tools and is home to 1.7 million researchers & high tech professionals. The opportunities are many for service providers to contribute to the development of EOSC into a rich environment offering a wide range of services and resources for researchers.

OCRE’s mission is to break through bureaucratic barriers by connecting commercial cloud services with the research community through several tendering processes. The tenders will result in a framework that will allow commercial cloud services to be included in the EOSC and will ensure easy access to these services for researchers. Suppliers selected from the procurement process will become pioneers as one of the early entrants to the EOSC marketplace - helping empower European research in answering Europe’s societal issues.

There is a strong demand for commercial cloud services in the European research community that has until now been limited by bureaucratic barriers and the lack of market understanding on all sides. 

OCRE recently closed its OCRE IaaS+ Tender for commercial cloud services, estimated at a total value of €600m. The announcement, link to the documents and portal for responding to the OCRE IaaS+ Tender can be found in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).

The project will also produce a second tender and framework agreement for the EO (Earth Observation) services providers and has already conducted a mapping of the landscape to gain concrete insights on the EO service offerings to present to the scientific community.