Brief description

The Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project aims to stimulate the usage uptake of commercial digital services (IaaS, SaaS and PaaS cloud services, as well as Earth Observation services) by the European research community. After gathering user requirements, the OCRE will manage the adoption funds and buy resources from the selected suppliers (OCRE will act as customer) and make cloud resources available to institutions. By the end, OCRE would have created a digital single market for commercial services for research.

Duration:
Jan 2019 to Jan 2022
Type:
Cloud, Edge, IoT, AI, Data

Our role

Trust-IT brings its expertise, by leading the activities of Community outreach, which consist of:

  • Ensuring a coordinated and continued communication of the OCRE project, providing appropriate visibility to all stakeholders.
  • Delivering and maintaining an actionable communication plan with feasible KPIs, describing all outreach activities that are going to be performed to support stakeholders and their engagement.
  • Collect requirements from the research community on the commercial services of interest.
  • Promote the OCRE-procured services via the EOSC-hub.
  • Organise and roll-out a requirements gathering workshop, a supplier info day and user and customer workshops.
  • Develop and track an effective uptake strategy to facilitate adoption for end-users and obtain user feedback.

Trust-IT also participates in the activities of project management, business desk, and service management technical platform.

Impact

Since the start of the project, Trust-IT ensured that OCRE became the reference point for commercial services in the European Open Science Cloud initiative. It ran a successful project launch promotion campaign that saw a high uptake of its press release. OCRE's tender was cited in a number of international cloud industry reports by Telecom Paper and Global Market Insights, among others.

Trust-IT coordinated the requirements gathering phase of the project carried out by partners CERN, RHEA, EARSC and Evenflow for commodity cloud and earth observation that resulted in surpassing the KPI target number of organisations by 2x and the diversity of disciplines providing input by 4x. It also coordinated the organisation of four requirements gathering and validation workshops. 

Through the implementation of a lead generation focused strategy, the project was able to gather a contacts database of some of the largest cloud and earth observation companies and engaged with them through webinars. 

Onboarding your target communities to ensure uptake of research solutions requires a structured approach, deep analytical skills and the design and implementation of communication and engagement plans made up of a mix of techniques and tools.

If you need to identify and build the perfect audience for your research activity and boost your community, contact us, we’ll be happy to help.

Contact us today!


Acknowledgements

OCRE receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 824079