The second virtual meeting of SIG-MSP (Special Interest Group on Management of Services Portfolio) took place on 29 September. It was great to see many familiar, but also numerous new faces – 38 participants from 24 NRENs were present, showing a strong interest towards the discussed topics as well as the importance of ongoing collaboration in the face of challenging times.
Michel Wets and his team from SURF gave an update on OCRE Cloud Services procurement. About a hundred suppliers have now submitted bids on OCRE tender. Very good qualitative responses were received from small and large European cloud providers, giving a good choice in all countries. Most award letters are expected to be sent in October with prioritisation for the countries and platforms where there has been most interest. Once contracts have been signed they will be shared with the NRENs. During the round table discussion “Procurement as a Service ” we heard about procurement experiences in national cloud journeys also from those who were using cloud framework contracts for the first time. The first OCRE webinar on adoption funding for Earth Observation services will take place on the 14th of October.
Then we heard from GÉANT’s own Sarah Jones who presented on services to support Open Science. It’s clear that Open Science is either a current priority or a future aspiration for 100% of the NRENs polled during the meeting! Furthermore 85% of respondents are already involved in national discussions and strategy setting. Many are offering relevant services such as filesender, data storage, HPC or repositories, and several new opportunities were suggested around how we can collectively better support science requirements and Open Science more broadly. This will be continued in a series of Open Science infoshares happening during the Autumn months.
The final topic was “Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH)”. During the session, the concept of the DIHs was presented by Marcin Plociennik from PSNC; this included the example of the pan-European EOSC DIHs, together with its relations to regional DIHs (e.g. HPC4Poland lead by PSNC). Digital Innovation Hubs are one-stop-shops that help companies to become more competitive with regard to their business/production processes, products or services using digital technologies. They provide access to the latest knowledge, expertise and technology to support their customers with piloting, testing and experimenting with digital innovations. DIHs also provide business and financing support to implement such innovations, if needed across the value chain. NRENs who are interested in DIHs are encouraged to contact partner-relations@geant.org for more information.
Available presentations slides as well as Mentimeter discussions results can be found on the meeting agenda page.
In a few months, the SIG-MSP group will meet again virtually and all members hope that very soon, the face to face contact will be possible again. The importance of meeting in person and having face-to-face discussions over a nice cup of coffee was strongly highlighted in the participants feedback.
