Results from ITEA project EASI-CLOUDS laid foundation for Materna’s Cloud Computing business

The ITEA 2 project EASI-CLOUDS ran successfully from September 2011 to March 2015 and gathered 30 partners from Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany and the Republic of Korea.

Its key challenge was to provide solutions to recurring concerns about the migration to Cloud Computing: vendor lock-in, quality of service guarantees, data protection and unclear financial impact of cloud-based business models. Public cloud providers as well as solutions to run private clouds (such as OpenStack) were already commonplace. However, seamlessly switching to the appropriate provider according to cost, location or quality was still a technical challenge, and one that would open a wide range of business opportunities.

OpenStack was quickly identified as the most promising solution for virtual infrastructure management – the dynamic allocation of virtual compute, storage and network resources in a data centre that is the cornerstone of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). During the project, partners gained expertise by setting up several IaaS testbeds and business models enabled by the EASI-CLOUDS platform even contributed with code to the OpenStack community.

The project’s results were already visible right after the completion of the project and its success was recognised in winning the Korea EUREKA Day Award for developing the most innovative and commercially viable EUREKA project and the ITEA Award of Excellence in the category ‘Business impact’ during the Co-summit 2015.

Materna was one of the EASI-CLOUDS partners and the members that participated in the project played an important role to further develop Materna’s cloud computing business and portfolio. They had, and still have, a leading role in launching and maintaining the Materna OpenStack demo center for customers and were also involved in important project pitches at the customer front.

In October 2016, Materna won a large customer deal based on IBM Blue Box, an OpenStack hosted private cloud environment. Furthermore, one of Materna’s executive vice-presidents gave a keynote speech at the OpenStackSummit in Barcelona in October 2016. Materna will organise the Materna IT Forum, a customer event taking place on 26th January 2017 with a dedicated workshop on Cloud Management. More information on this event can be found at the website http://www.materna-itforum.de/

These results clearly show that Materna’s participation in EASI-CLOUDS and the knowledge and results gained from it laid a foundation for Materna’s current Cloud Computing business!

For more information, read the Materna press release (German).