BT, Accenture and IBM win European Commission cloud contracts

The European Commission has signed £26.6m in contracts with several IT service providers in order to bolster its cloud capabilities.

The largest tranche of contracts headed BT’s way, with the commission awarding it £7.7m worth of contracts over the next four years for its private cloud.

The EC also revealed which other companies will provide the European institution with cloud services. The contracts, worth a combined €34.6m are broken up into three lots. BT with its BT Limited Belgian Branch was awarded Lot 1 for private cloud and Lot 2 for public cloud. IBM, Accenture, ATOS, and Cloud Team Alliance were awarded contracts in Lot 2. 

The EC said that its private cloud will comprise compute and storage facilities hosted by BT and linked to EC datacentres by a dedicated private network. Its public infrastructure-as-a-service contract will deliver “compute and storage facilities … over the public internet”, it said.

Where the EC searched for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) service providers, it awarded contracts in Lot 3 to Telecom Italia, Accenture, ATOS, and IBM. The latter suppliers will offer “more than just storage and compute facilities”, according to the EC, and will provide “operating systems and/or database services built upon cloud infrastructure.”

“The tender is the first decisive step for the European Commission towards the use of the cloud for its own systems,” the commission said. “The call for tender will allow the deployment of a first set of IT services in the cloud during 2016. A series of use cases are studied and should be deployed in the coming months.”

“The cloud will enable the commission to follow the ceaseless pace of today’s technological race among infrastructure providers where costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power are decreasing day by day while enabling at the same time innovative solutions for new challenges such as Big Data,” the commission added.

Corrado Sciolla, president of BT Global Services in Europe, said: “This is a milestone in our journey to be the leading global cloud services integrator, and demonstrates how we minimise the complexity, risks and costs for our customers as they move to the cloud.”

The contracts agreed for private and public cloud provision will be valid until 2020.

 

Geoffrey.lyons

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