Helix Nebula Initiative & PICSE: Enabling a Dynamic Cloud Ecosystem in Europe

The Helix Nebula Initiative 5th General Assembly "Enabling a Dynamic Cloud Ecosystem" took place on 26-27 November 2014 at ESA/ESRIN, Frascati, Italy.

The event, organized by the Helix Nebula Initiative - HNI and the newly-launched project, Procurement Innovation for Cloud Services in Europe - PICSE, gathered over 50 managers, cloud providers, policy makers, procurers and researchers dealing with the adoption of cloud computing.

Bob Jones, of CERN and co-/coordinator of the Helix Nebula Initiative and of the PICSE project, opened the event highlighting the achievements of HNI towards enabling a cloud productive environment in Europe. It was also highlighted that, moving forward, one important priority for HNI is to open up the European federated cloud marketplace to a wider number of suppliers – currently around 30 commercial and publicly funded cloud service providers are part of it – such that demand-side organizations in future can benefit from an even broader portfolio of cloud services.

The workshop also focused on the procurement of cloud services in Europe bringing together the members of the PICSE initiative.

PICSE has come about thanks to work carried out during the HNI pilot phase, which demonstrated that cloud services are suitable for many scientific workloads performed by public research organizations which are thus now prepared to consider procuring commercial cloud services on a significant scale.
Funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme, PICSE will set up a European Procurers' Platform, capable of raising the level of understanding of the issues surrounding procurement of cloud services, based on a set of procurement use cases from the science domain. PICSE will develop a simpler innovative procurement model for public national and international research organizations, and will set out a realistic roadmap for cloud procurement over the next five years. PICSE aims to become the Central Point for the Public Sector Pre Commercial Procurement (PCP) and Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) community.

The project started at the beginning of October 2014 and is run by three Helix Nebula members (CERN, CSA and Trust-IT services).

Read the full article here

Source: ISGTW

 

 

Publication date: 15 Jan 2015