On April 2015, CERN published the paper "Towards the Open European Science Cloud". The paper outlines the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud that will enable digital science by introducing IT as a Service to the public research sector in Europe.
The European Commission stands to gain significant advantages from allowing its developers and contractors to contribute to outside Free Software projects. By distributing its own programs as Free Software, the Commission can enable the interoperability gains and efficiency savings that come with reuse. Such releases also make valuable assets available to the taxpayers who paid for them, enabling further economic exploitation.
This document provides a state of the art analysis of how public research organizations procure ICT services and identifies the challenges when the procurement is focused on cloud services. The document also reports what public sector organizations are doing to procure cloud services and how cloud service providers are responding to the demand - side. Finally it presents the basic structure on which the PICSE procurement model for cloud services will build on.
On 13th February 2015, Sara Garavelli, Trust-IT Services and PICSE consortium, gave the presentation: "EU procurement support for cloud technologies" at the Europeana Tech 2015 conference. The presentation summarizes the first achievements of the PICSE project and describes the opportunities made available by the European Commission in the field of the procurement of cloud services.
The EIROforum IT Working Group published in 2013 the e‐Infrastructure for the 21st Century document that presented a vision for an integrated set of e-Infrastructure services to support the growing needs of data intensive science. An year later EIROforum IT Working Group has released an updated version of this document: “e-Infrastructure for the 21st Century – One Year Later”
Bob Jones, CERN & PICSE & Helix Nebula initiative coordinator, presented PICSE - Procurement Innovation for Cloud Services in Europe, at the Information Day on 3rd October 2014.
PICSE is a completely new initiative, funded under the first wave of H2020 1st call, started on the 1st October 2014 in the field of procurement of cloud services for the public sector and will run for 18 months.
This report will include: a collection of procurement good practices in the public sector, both in Research and Public Administration, which would cover real life examples in Europe as well as outside the EEA (e.g. USA); a comparison between procurement practices in the public and private sector and a description of how current good practices can overcome barriers and the identification of unaddressed challenges.
Presentation by Bob Jones, CERN & Helix-Nebula & PICSE coordinator, at the European Research e-Infrastructures and Innovation Clusters workshop, 3 October 2014, Brussels, Belgium
A policy vision document by the Steering Board of the European Cloud Partnership.
The European Union, like most of the world, faces economically challenging times. In such times, it becomes all the more important to recognise and seize new and unique opportunities to drive growth, stimulate innovation, and to provide benefits to citizens, businesses and public administrations. One of these opportunities is cloud computing.