Sparkle joins the European Open Cloud for Research Environments Project
Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and the eighth leading global operator, has been selected for the wave 1 of the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) Voucher Program to provide European researchers with access to AWS’s services.
The OCRE 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. To save institutions from the time-consuming and complex process of identifying and selecting the providers by themselves, the project leverages on GÉANT, the pan-European IaaS Framework Agreement interconnecting 38 national research and educational institutes.
More specifically, OCRE has launched a Voucher Program that has been conceived as a standardized contractual vehicle to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions through 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), and application development, deployment and management.
Thanks to its multi cloud offering based on proprietary infrastructure and on AWS cloud, Sparkle has now been chosen to act as a unique AWS cloud reseller for researchers across Europe, also through a flexible and consistent model enabling the end-to-end voucher fruition, from the activation to the conversion, to the consumptions reporting.