Commercial services and support for EOSC have a twofold aim: to enable access to commercial cloud services for researchers as well as to involve industry and SMEs in the EOSC landscape, which improves the exploitation of scientific research products.
The framework for establishing, maintaining, and distributing procurement-compliant agreements with research-relevant commercial services (and data providers) builds on the results of the OCRE project and makes services from multiple commercial service providers available under favourable terms and conditions to all EOSC users by exploiting cross-border joint pan-European procurement with 40+ countries.
Through the EOSC Digital Innovation Hub (DIH), EOSC Future is enabling innovation within the industry by leveraging EOSC services and data. Bringing together industry and the scientific community, the EOSC DIH community acts both as a supplier and a user of EOSC to further stimulate cross-fertilisation across sectors, promoting innovation and the digitisation of SMEs.
Target groups
- researchers
- service providers
- data catalogue managers
- resource providers
- resource users
- SMEs
State of play
Procurement call results:
- Demand for commercial cloud services clearly indicated
- Funding procurement mechanism using OCRE Cloud Framework (available via EOSC) as preferred community procurement route with highly favourable terms and conditions clearly demonstrated
- Value of Community/Industry partnerships in driving innovative research solutions proven in calls 2 and 3 (development of RI services)
EOSC DIH business pilots:
- Provision of EOSC resources and DIH services to SMEs via business pilots and to a wider EOSC DIH community
- Enrichment of EOSC MP with innovative services
- Development of strategic partnerships with relevant EOSC DIH stakeholders
- Development of the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework
Next steps:
- The governance and funding structure to be set up (part of the larger EOSC governance and funding discussion)
- Identification of demand on a large scale (to be done outside the project lifetime)
- address future sustainability of the EOSC DIH.
Key benefits/impact for EOSC
Ultimately, commercial services and support for EOSC were:
- improving the quality of research
- reducing the burden for research organisations and other service users to engage in complex procurement processes
- aggregating demand at hyperscale to counter supplier weight
- supporting cross-analysis of data from heterogeneous sources
- creating market opportunities for innovative research data services
- supporting SMEs and industry to maximise the impact of science research outputs to benefit the wider European society
In turn, this promoted and supported the commercial exploitation of data, software, workflows, and services, with tailored support for SMEs.