OCRE Launches Earth Observation Catalogue for Research

OCRE has launched the OCRE Earth Observation (EO) Catalogue which will be used as a reference for shortlisting suppliers to procure services for the EO funding for research winners and giving visibility to Earth Observation service providers in the growing European Open Science Cloud community.

The OCRE EO Catalogue, similar to the OCRE Cloud Catalogue, is a key result of the OCRE project which aims to create a digital single market for commercial EO and Cloud services for research in Europe. 

The first procurement activities where OCRE aims to source Earth Observation services and products were started in mid-January 2022 with further procurements foreseen in the first half of 2022.

OCRE Project Director David Heyns (GÉANT) said,

We are seeing great demand for bespoke EO services based on Copernicus across all science disciplines in Europe. The OCRE EO Catalogue will provide extensive visibility to the growing number of innovative suppliers in this space, as well as opportunities to participate in the OCRE adoption funding initiatives and outreach across the broader EOSC -  David Heyns (GÉANT) OCRE Project Director.

OCRE’s mission is to make it easier to procure both Cloud and EO services, but the Cloud and EO markets are not at the same level of maturity in terms of supply and demand. The EO market is much smaller, with many service providers being SMEs and Start-Ups, unlike the multinational giants of Cloud Computing. For the OCRE Cloud procurement, a Pan-European framework agreement was the best way to facilitate procurement for research. In the case of EO, smaller companies are involved with smaller needs, so a simplified procurement method was chosen. For each of the EO Funding for Research winners, at least three of the EO companies in the OCRE EO Catalogue will be shortlisted to choose from. Then, based on the requirements and criteria of the research project and the response from these suppliers, a provider will be awarded, fulfilling the minimum requirements for a fair procurement.

On 15 December OCRE started gathering info from EO companies to form the dynamic catalogue, and it is open to applications.

Companies listed in the OCRE catalogue can benefit from visibility in the growing European Open Science Cloud environment and being more easily discoverable from university and research centres toward which the catalogue will be advertised.

Our role

Trust-IT is the communications lead in OCRE and has supported the project in publicising a pan-European tender leading to 473 framework contract agreement, as well as publishing and disseminating the calls for research projects to act as showcases for commercial cloud and EO services resulting in Millions of Euros in funding for research. 
The OCRE EO Catalogue was both populated through a call for submissions run on the OCRE website and implemented as a catalogue by the Trust-IT team, having already implemented the OCRE Cloud Catalogue on the website a year earlier.

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Article by

Zachary Smith
Content Strategist & Copywriter