Following a call for organising buyer groups to be listed in the OCRE Tender, up to 39 countries, through the national research and education networks (NREN), have committed to be listed as buyer group coordinators, providing an indication of the strong demand for commercial digital research services. 

Buyer group coordinators will coordinate the demand from their respective institutions within their countries and ensure that these are reflected in the OCRE Tender. For OCRE, enlisting coordinators to come forward is the first step to aggregating the demand from the research market in Europe. 

Majority of Europe is now covered by the OCRE Tender through NRENs that committed in their role as buyer group coordinators in the OCRE Tender.

The OCRE Tender, which will be published by the end of October 2019, will help source IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and digital Earth Observation services for use by researchers and their institutions.

The past few months since the project started concentrated on requirements gathering activities through events outreach, requirements workshops, online surveys, and one-on-one interviews with more than a hundred respondents from the research community as well as from the supply side.

The tender will also take into account the demand and requirements specified by the listed buyer groups and individual institutions.

Institutions not covered by the NRENs listed as coordinators

For institutions that are in countries that aren't listed above or are not members of the NRENs mentioned previously, they can still benefit from the OCRE Tender and receive support through adoption funds by expressing interest in joining the OCRE Tender. Additional buyer groups and individual institutions can still organise themselves and express interest before the deadline of 12 September 2019, 18:00 CEST.

This was previously covered in our last news post where individual institutions were encouraged to signup to the OCRE Tender considering the many benefits for being included.