EGI joins forces with CloudSME UG
The EGI Foundation is pleased to announce a formal collaboration with CloudSME UG, a private company helping small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) access the power of simulations built by experts in manufacturing and engineering. This agreement is an excellent example of how the public and private sector can join forces to stimulate research and innovation.
Andreas Ocklenburg, CEO of CloudSME, underlines this importance: “Our software vendor, value added re-seller and manufacturing SME customers will be able to get access to a large resource pool as well as to the vast technical expertise that EGI represents. Collaborating with EGI will further strengthen CloudSME’s position towards the academic and research community and our customers will receive even higher level of computing resources, expertise and support than before”.
Six EGI cloud providers, together with a large research community, will support the objectives of the agreement to integrate the EGI FedCloud with the CloudSME cloud-based simulation platform. Efforts are supported through EGI’s Business Engagement Programme that aims to support SMEs with sustainable distributed computing services needed for their work.
Yannick Legré, Managing Director of the EGI Foundation, comments on the collaboration: “Serving European SMEs and supporting their research and innovation is at the heart of EGI's mission thanks to the dedication of all its participants”.
The CloudSME UG platform lowers barriers such as hardware and license costs, and access to expertise by developing a cloud-based, one-stop-shop simulation software platform solution, thus enabling much wider take-up of simulation software technologies by engineering and manufacturing.
The EGI federation brings together more than 350 data centres worldwide and also includes the largest community cloud federation in Europe with 21 cloud providers across 12 European countries offering IaaS cloud and storage services. EGI offering includes a federated IaaS cloud to run compute- or data-intensive tasks and host online services in virtual machines or docker containers on IT resources accessible via a uniform interface.
The EGI – CloudSME UG partnership aims to:
- Integrate the EGI FedCloud with the CloudSME cloud-based simulation platform (e.g. via OpenStack, OpenNebula)
- Leverage the EGI Business Engagement Programme to support CloudSME customers in research, investigation, and development phases.
- Establish longer-term business relationships based on initial proof of concepts.
In the photo (from left to right):
Andreas Andreas Ocklenburg, CEO of CloudSME
Yannick Legré, Managing Director of the EGI Foundation