With government ministries from five European countries involved, Cloud for Europe (C4E) sees collaboration between public authorities and industry to provide a streamlined cloud service procurement process. This lowers the Total Cost of Ownership, fixes financial costs, and importantly, shortens the procurement and the service provisioning process as well as the purchase of non-existing services.
The Digital Library of the Commons defines ‘commons’ as “a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest”. The idea behind the Commons cloud credits business model is to provide unified access to a choice of “Commons-conformant” compute resources. This cloud credits model will offer individual investigators a choice of cloud providers so that the investigators themselves can select the best value for their individual research needs.
An evident barrier for procurement of cloud services is the contrast between outdated procurement practices and emerging standard practices in the business world. Cloud Service Brokers (CSB) act as an intermediary and aggregator of services provided by different cloud service providers and can reduce this barrier.
The UK’s G-Cloud is the seventh iteration of a collection of framework agreements that allows UK government departments and public sector organisations to buy offthe-shelf, pay-as-you-go cloud solutions from a list of preapproved vendors through an online store (the Digital Marketplace) without needing to run a full tender or competitive procurement process; No OJEU (Official Journal of the Euro
We are a National Research Institute with around 1,500 researchers and employees. As a public funded body, we have to procure ICT goods and services according to national law. The institute’s IT department is responsible for identifying technical requirements and drafting specifications for the services to acquire.
We are part of a major public research university with 11 constituent faculties, within which there are over 100 departments, institutes and research centres. We have a large library system that comprises 18 libraries located across several sites, linked together by a central networking catalogue and request system for over 2 million books. Since 2004, we have been collecting the scholarly work of internal researchers to make it freely available on the internet via an open access repository. The intention is that material we curate will remain accessible indefinitely.
We are an independent intergovernmental organization providing a weather forecasting service and weather data catalogue to 34 countries (member states) and commercial clients. We also provide computing resources to the meteorological user community. We have a supercomputer facility (and associated data archive) which is one of the largest of its type in Europe. Our procurement process is designed to achieve both quality and value for money in the procurement of goods and services. We use an open tender process and as an international organisation, we are governed by our convention and its associated financial regulations.
We are an international organization with just under 200 member nations and present in over 130 countries. Our procurement process is based on the fundamental principles of best value for money, fairness, transparency, economy and effectiveness. It is based on a formal contract award procedure which follows a competitive procurement process. Participation in the solicitation process is only open to vendors that are registered to the UN Global Marketplace (UNGM) via the vendor registration portal.
We are a biomedical research agency based in the United States. Our mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behaviour of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.
We are an agency funded by the European Union that operates independently of the European legislative and executive institutions (Commission, Council, and Parliament) and EU Member States. Our agency was set up in 2002 to be a source of scientific advice and communication on risks associated with the food chain. The agency was legally established by the EU under the General Food Law - Regulation 178/2002. The General Food Law created a European food safety system in which responsibility for risk assessment (science) and for risk management (policy) are kept separate. Our duty is to communicate our scientific findings to the public.