OCRE IaaS+ tender published

Today the 16th of April, OCRE announces the publication of its OCRE IaaS+ Tender for commercial cloud services that will empower the research capabilities of the European research community. 

The announcement, link to the documents and portal for responding to the OCRE IaaS+ Tender estimated at a total value of €600m - can be found in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).

The tender aims to aggregate requirements from the European Research community and facilitate the provision of services from commercial cloud providers. This has been bolstered by an extensive requirements gathering campaign engaging both the demand side - researchers research institutions and groups of potential buyers and the supply side - cloud service providers particularly on their limitations on responding to the tender and the types of services they can provide. Today's launch also follows the publication and feedback gathering of pre-tender launch documents through the Prior Information Notice.

Services resulting from OCRE’s tenders will be included in the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud). Suppliers selected from the procurement process will become pioneers as one of the early entrants to the EOSC marketplace - helping empower European research in answering Europe’s societal issues.

There is a strong demand for commercial cloud services in the European research community that has until now been limited by bureaucratic barriers and the lack of market understanding on all sides. 

OCRE’s mission is to break through bureaucratic barriers by connecting commercial cloud services with the research community through several tendering processes. The tenders will result in a framework that will ensure easy access to commercial cloud and digital Earth observation services for researchers.

In addition to this, OCRE also has at its disposal €9.5 million in adoption funding to be distributed to institutions and buyer groups that procure services through the OCRE tenders. This means the demand side is incentivised to acquire more resources from the winning suppliers from the OCRE procurement process. 

Now that the IaaS+ Tender has been launched, OCRE’s procurement team will commence work on finalising the tender for Earth Observation services and prepare it for publication.

The OCRE IaaS+ Tender Document is free to access.
View the Tender Document now!