Sparkle to Drive Cloud Adoption in European Research Community

Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top ten global operators, has been awarded as OCRE Cloud Framework provider by GÉANT, the pan-European network and services provider for research and education. Under the agreement, Sparkle will offer cloud solutions and professional services to R&E institutions in 27 countries.

The Open Clouds for Research Environment (OCRE) project was launched in 2019 by a consortium led by GÉANT and incorporating also CERN, RHEA and Trust-IT with the aim to enable and facilitate cloud adoption in the European research community.

Through ready-to-use service agreements with cloud service providers and a €9.5 million funding made available by the European Commission, the OCRE Cloud Framework offers to the R&E community a standardized contractual vehicle to ease the purchase of these solutions for over 10,000 research and education organisations.

With a tender process finalized at the end of 2020, Sparkle has been awarded as OCRE Cloud Framework provider and Google Cloud integrator in 27 European countries: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Within the agreement, Sparkle will provide turnkey cloud solutions based on Google Cloud technologies, blended with professional services to support institutions in their move to the cloud. The experience provided by Sparkle’s competence centre will be augmented by Noovle, the new TIM Group wholly owned centre of excellence for cloud and edge computing.

Already qualified as a GÉANT selected provider for the 2016-2020 period, with this new award Sparkle confirms its commitment to offer the best cloud solutions to the research and education community and reduce the costs and complexity of the transition to the cloud. Thanks to its multi cloud offering, Sparkle provides cloud services across multiple public and private platforms along with management consoles and connectivity services to connect customers’ on-premises cloud facilities to the major public cloud providers through private, high speed and secure connections.