The OCRE project responds to the specific need of stimulating the use of commercial cloud and Earth Observation services by the European research community. At the start of the project, the adoption of such services was particularly low because researchers and research institutions struggled to find the proper service providers and reach legal and technical agreements with them.

To address this challenge, OCRE aggregated community demand and requirements and applied these into a pan-european call for competition for commercial service providers to respond to. These tenders have resulted in  procurement-compliant framework agreements with suitable suppliers providing a list of services on the EOSC Marketplace.

Such contracts opened the way to researchers  to consume the services through ready-to-use contracts, also benefiting from adoption vouchers that were made available  via funding waves dedicated to either cloud or EO services and whose usage was facilitated by National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) acting as intermediaries to let their members know and easily access the services.

In order to put such systems in place, OCRE had to work preliminarily on the identification  and analysis of tender requirements during the tender preparation phase to ensure that user needs, especially of those in EO organisations, were taken into account.

The task on requirements collection for commodity cloud services was led by CERN, who launched a comprehensive survey targeted to individual researchers in Europe to identify consumption habits, needs and technical requirements for commercial cloud services. The research was conducted in collaboration with the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc) and the Marie Curie Alumni Association.

Requirements gathering for EO was similarly conducted via dedicated webinars, workshops and face-to-face events, online surveys and interviews.

The derived insights were used as an input to the implementation of voucher schemes in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and are summarised in the two reports below.

Read more about the OCRE Long Tail of Science's Requirements for Commodity Cloud Services in Europe methodology and results:

OCRE Requirements for Commodity Cloud Services in Europe

Read more about the OCRE Research Infrastructures and NRENs' Requirements for Commodity Cloud Services in Europe methodology and results:

OCRE Requirements for Commodity Cloud Services in Europe

Read more about the OCRE Earth Observation services requirements gathering methodology and results:

OCRE Earth Observation services requirements gathering