Sparkle Selected for the Open Clouds for Research Environments Voucher Program

Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top ten global operators, has been selected for the wave 1 of the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) Voucher Program to provide thousands of European researchers with access to AWS’s services and compute capabilities to power and advance their research.

The Open Clouds for Research Environments project, launched in 2019, aims at accelerating the adoption of cloud services and of earth observation services in the European research community, through a €9.5 million funding made available by the European Commission. In addition, the project leverages on GÉANT IaaS Framework Agreement with cloud service providers to save institutions from the time-consuming and complex process of identifying and selecting the providers by themselves.

To stimulate the uptake of digital services, OCRE has launched a Voucher Program that has been conceived as a standardized contractual vehicle to provision Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions across a pre-defined number of vouchers distributed to individual European researchers, thus enabling the use of cloud services also by “the long-tail-of-science”.

Vouchers will be available in different denominations, from €500 to €2,000 and will allow individual researchers to access the broad set of AWS’s services including compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management.

Sparkle is already a qualified IaaS framework provider of GÉANT - the pan-European research and education networking project that interconnects 38 European national research and education networks-, thanks to its multi cloud offering based on proprietary infrastructure and on Amazon Web Services cloud. Sparkle has now been chosen to act as a unique AWS cloud reseller for researchers across Europe, thanks to a flexible and consistent model enabling the end-to-end voucher fruition, from the activation to the conversion to the consumptions reporting.